In the Huffington Post‘s article on the “smoking gun” e-mail providing evidence of a former Democratic New Jersey Governor’s malfeasance in the collapse of MF Global, Marcy Gordon neglected to mention the partisan affiliation of Mr. Corzine:

A former MF Global executive appears to contradict testimony from Jon Corzine, saying the former senator and New Jersey governor ordered the transfer of $200 million last fall out of a customer account days before the brokerage firm collapsed, according to an email obtained by congressional investigators.

Edith O’Brien, MF Global’s former assistant treasurer, says Corzine ordered the money shifted to one of the firm’s bank accounts overseas on Oct. 28 to cover an overdraft, according to a memo that cited the email.

Ms. Gordon also neglects to mention that President Barack had traveled to New Jersey to campaign for said Democrat.  Jim Hoft does the work that Ms. Gordon.  You can bet she would have reported a campaign stop George W. Bush made to shore up a Republican politician, who, in the private sector, was reported to be involved in some shady activities.

Jim Hoft has provided some details about Mr. Corzine and the administration that Ms. Gordon neglected to provide, linking this video embedded below where Vice President acknowledges how, during the transition, the Obama team called Corzine for economic advice: (more…)

White House Using Taxpayer Cash to Pay for Spin: (more…)

When you read the top headline on AOL, you get the sense that this miscreant donated the bulk of the money he bilked from health care agencies to the Tea Party.

In fact, as the lead paragraph of the linked article indicates, he didn’t even donate 1/1,000 of 1% of the alleged swindle to the Tea Party:

If Texas physician Jacques Roy turns out to be guilty of charges he conspired to defraud Medicare and Medicaid of almost $375 million, we’ll know where at least $1,650 of that money went: to a political action committee affiliated with the Tea Party Express, a group opposed to the health reform law that helped nab him.

Now, if this man did what was alleged to have done, he should spend a long time behind bars.

What is telling is how AOL tries to spin this, as if the purpose of the fraud were to help the Tea Party.  Even the article’s headline suggests as much, “Jacques Roy, Charged With $375 Million In Health Care Fraud, Gave Money To Tea Party.”

By contrast, none of their headlines on Tony Rezko’s troubles with the law reference his relationship to Barack Obama–though they do come close here, but that relates to Rod Blagojevich’s woes–and not those of the one-time fundraiser for the ambitious state Senator from Chicago.  (Rezko, a convicted felon, now sits in prison, serving a 10 1/2-sentence “for extorting millions of dollars from firms seeking state business or regulatory approval“.)

(According to the New York Times, Mr. Rezko donated more to Mr. Obama’s first campaign than Dr. Roy donated (in total) to the Tea Party Express:  the then-state legislator’s “first campaign donations included $2,000 from Mr. Rezko’s companies.“)

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds linked an Andrew Breitbart video that, well, I just can’t get out of my mind.  I’m not sure I share the new media pioneer’s hypothesis, but others have offered opinions similar to his, namely that the administration crafted the Fast and Furious program in order to create “a narrative that they could use in America to try and thwart our Second Amendment constitutional rights.”

Until Attorney General Eric Holder releases the documents requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, we won’t know why the Justice Department went forward with this plan.  We still don’t know why the project’s planners failed to include two components of a similar program, Operation Wide Receiver, namely that that Bush era program (1) “did involve an attempt to track the firearms, while Fast and Furious did not” and (2) that  “Operation Wide Receiver was run in conjunction with the Mexican government, while Fast and Furious was kept secret from not only Mexico, but [also] from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) attaché to Mexico, Darren Gil.” (more…)

One of our readers observed a Facebook phenomenon among his (liberal) friends that applies to mine as well:

Getting a lot of posts about how sexy the President was singing an Al Greene song. It’s all I can do not to comment how much more sexy he will be when he is the ex-President.

The song, as I noted in a previous post, is all about staying together.   Our friends on the left have crafted this image of Obama as a unifier with their primary evidence being his speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004.  (They conveniently ignore his voting record in the U.S. Senate and his rhetorical outbursts and public statements at odds with his rhetorical flourishes and campaign-created public image.)

Today, Charlie Spiering at the Washington Examiner provided further evidence that the incumbent president seeks to win reelection not by pushing us to stay together, but by creating false choices to tear us apart.  At a campaign fundraiser in New York, he told supporters (including disgraced Congressman Charles Rangel) “that Republicans are more radical than ever“:

The Republicans in Congress, the candidates running for President, they’ve got a very specific idea about where they want to take this country. . . .   They want to reduce the deficit by gutting our investments in education, by gutting our investments in research and technology, by letting our roads and our bridges and our airports deteriorate.

If a Republican president leveled those kind of allegations against his partisan adversaries, our friends in the legacy media would submit his charges to a fact check.

RELATED: More demagoguery from the divider

The left-leaning daily in our nation’s capital is finally reporting on an Obama administration scandal, but do wonder if they are doing so deliberately on a day when most people aren’t paying much attention to the news.

At least they do report how “infused” the green technology program was “at every level“:

Meant to create jobs and cut reliance on foreign oil, Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal ­e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials.

The records, some previously unreported, show that when warned that financial disaster might lie ahead, the administration remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra.

Via Instapundit.

A week ago, Bruce posted a piece suggesting that the Fast and Furious scandal was worse than Watergate.  Perhaps, it’s not that bad, not a question of administration malfeasance, but just one of bureaucratic incompetence.

Yesterday, Republicans grilled Attorney General Eric Holder when the Democrat testified before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.  He might have taken his cues in handling testimony from Johnny Friendly‘s (Lee J. Cobb) cronies in On the Waterfront. He was deaf and dumb about what was going on in his outfit.

Well, maybe he really didn’t know.  And if he didn’t, well, the best term to describe his leadership at Justice is incompetent.  So, he claims, he didn’t read the memos (addressed to him) detailing the “operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to allow straw buyers to smuggle guns into Mexico“, a program which “resulted in the deaths of more than 200 Mexican citizens and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.”

Now, of course, the Attorney General is a busy man and can’t read every word of every 100-page memo addressed to him.  But, that’s why he has a big staff.  And you’d think one of his aides would alert the government’s top law enforcement official to a program allowing buyers to smuggle guns — without tracking devices — into Mexico.  Oh, yeah, and the ATF wasn’t informing the Mexican government about this program.

You’d think that when word of this program became public (or at least became known to the Attorney General), he’d fire  – or at least severely discipline — those on his staff who didn’t alert him to a program which resulted in the deaths of Mexican citizens — and a U.S. law enforcement official.  But, as Michelle Malkin reported yesterday Holder only offers a vague statement about making personnel changes and it’s not all he’s “possibly” going to do. (more…)

Take a gander of how AOL heads the story on former Democratic New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s congressional testimony:

In the article, there’s nary a word about the failed CEO”s Democratic affiliation nor his service as governor of the Garden State, nor any mention of his advisory role in the Obama administration.

Guess in their rush to get this story out, the folks at Arianna Huffington’s eponymous Post just let these minor details slip their minds.

Let’s imagine that George W. Bush’s Department of Justice had a program going that funneled weapons to the drug cartels of Mexico and then that directly to the murder of a US Border Patrol Agent. I have no doubt that the network news would be on full-scale nuke alert and heads would be rolling, including the President’s.

Now let’s imagine the truth:

In the growing Fast and Furious scandal, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s death in Peck Canyon, Arizona was previously described as a chance meeting that led to a firefight: an illegal alien “rip crew” working for the Sinaloa cartel was hoping to find other illegal aliens and to rob them at gunpoint. Instead, they stumbled across a Border Patrol unit and murdered Agent Terry.

Last week, the Washington Times offered a new version of the encounter: they reported that the rip crew was not hunting illegals, but Border Patrol teams — with the intention of engaging them in combat.

Sources now tell PJ Media that neither version of events is accurate: the rip crew was not waiting for a chance encounter with other illegals, nor did the members intend to engage American law enforcement agents.

The rip crew was in Peck Canyon that evening with the intention of stealing money and drugs from a specific shipment of which they had prior knowledge.

Sources claim the Department of Justice has been trying for almost a year to hide the key information — how the rip crew knew the shipment was coming through that night.

Criminal informants (CIs) are a common tool of law enforcement agencies. When agencies apprehend criminals, agencies often reduce or drop charges in exchange for information leading to the arrests of higher-ranking criminals. Earlier this year, reports claimed that Operation Fast and Furious weapons smuggled over the border were actually chosen by an FBI informant, and paid for with money provided by the federal government.

The rip crew knew to be in Peck Canyon that December evening because a CI working for the FBI found out about a smuggling run — from the FBI.

It is not clear if the information was provided intentionally, but a possible motivation for the FBI to provide the information is known to exist: the CI had previously lost a shipment of drugs, and wanted to regain the trust of the cartel with an offering of drugs or money. The other possibility is that the FBI mistakenly allowed the CI to discover the information.

The CI used this information to organize an ambush of the drug convoy. A source tells PJM that the FBI knew from wiretaps that the CI was using their information to set up an ambush.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — through its own CIs and communications intercepts — was also aware of the planned assault.

Neither the DEA nor FBI warned Border Patrol about the expected criminal activity.

This is completely outrageous. But the American news media is laying on their backs like supine sheep. Please call your Member of Congress & US Senator TOMORROW and demand that Attorney General Eric Holder resign and that President Obama be held to account for these crimes.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Via The Hill:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) will announce Monday that he is not seeking re-election, ending a 32-year career in the House.

Frank, 71, is the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee and the architect, with former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), of the sweeping Wall Street regulatory reform law enacted in 2010.

He is scheduled to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. in his district, according to a spokesman, who said the congressman would announce at that time the reason for his decision, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) will announce Monday that he is not seeking re-election, ending a 32-year career in the House.

Frank, 71, is the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee and the architect, with former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), of the sweeping Wall Street regulatory reform law enacted in 2010.

He is scheduled to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. in his district, according to a spokesman, who said the congressman would announce at that time the reason for his decision.

Hopefully his next stop will be prison for the economic crimes he has committed against the United States of America.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Do wonder how much effort our friends at the New York Times have put into investigating the various scandals swirling about the Obama administration, you know, like politicized hiring at the Justice Department, steering subsidies and loan guarantees to “green” companies with Democratic connections, selling guns to Mexican drug lords . . . .

Maybe their reporters are just too busy covering other issues, like, you know, important things, like, well . . .

. . .  Mitt Romney’s hair.

By far his most distinctive physical feature, Mr. Romney’s head of impeccably coiffed black hair has become something of a cosmetological Rorschach test on the campaign trail, with many seeing in his thick locks everything they love and loathe about the Republican candidate for the White House. (Commanding, reassuring, presidential, crow fans; too stiff, too slick, too perfect, complain critics.)

Thanks to my oldest nephew for the tip.  Guess this is just more newsworthy than the various Obama scandals.

Earlier today, Bruce e-mailed me this tweet, “OMG! Bush told Halliburton to delay announcing layoffs until after the ’06 elections!!!????”  Therein, @robertcurlin linked a Washington Post article that has gotten a lot of conservative tongues wagging:

The Obama administration urged officers of the struggling solar company Solyndra to postpone announcing planned layoffs until after the November 2010 midterm elections, newly released e-mails show.

Solyndra, the now-shuttered California company, had been a poster child of President Obama’s initiative to invest in clean energies and received the administration’s first energy loan of $535 million. But a year ago, in October 2010, the solar panel manufacturer was quickly running out of money and had warned the Energy Department it would need emergency cash to avoid having to shut down.

The new e-mails about the layoff announcement were released Tuesday morning as part of a House Energy and Commerce committee memo, provided in advance of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s scheduled testimony before the investigative committee Thursday.

Read the whole thing.   “Yeah — that’s odd,” Ed Morrissey offers in a mock deadpan:

The DoE requested that a privately-held corporation withhold important financial information from investors until the day after a national election.  But that’s just a coincidence … right?  Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

This means that the DoE knew that Solyndra had begun to fail, and that the cash they provided as part of Barack Obama’s job stimulus wouldn’t actually create jobs.  (more…)

It’s not just CNN.  Glenn Reynolds sums it up:

THE SOLYNDRA-OBAMA TIES: “While everyone else in the political universe is chasing down rumors about Herman Cain making women uncomfortable, Fox News got down on the real scandal: President Obama giving a half-billion dollars of public money to a major campaign donor.”

Wonder how many stories Politico ran on Solyndra or Fast and Furious where the best that can be said for the Attorney General is that he’s incompetent.

In yesterday’s WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), Dorothy Rabinowitz forecast that the “saga of the painted-over rock on the Perry family hunting grounds will roll on a few more days before it’s displaced by some other invented scandal”. Yeah, our media do seem more transfixed with such invented scandals (provided they involve a prominent a Republican) than they are with real scandals involving the incumbent Democratic President of the United States.

Indeed, it seems that Mr. Perry has already been subject to more scrutiny over his recreational activities than Barack Obama received about his voting record (or absence* thereof), his political associates (and associations) and his theological choices. Indeed, save for the conservative blogs, Jake Tapper’s inquiries and a journalist or two at CBS News, the mainstream media seem unusually indifferent to a variety of scandals swirling inside the incumbent administration.

1. The collapse of Solyndra and the guaranteeing of loans to energy companies enjoying “cozy relationships” with leading Democrats. No wonder the administration is trying to distract us, suggesting Republican opposition to solar subsidies is based on “defeatism.”
2. Gunrunner or Operation Fast and Furious, where the White House deems it “reasonable” for media to ignore a story about our government authorizing and facilitating the sale of guns to murderous Mexican drug cartels.  And where the Attorney General appears to be, um, well, misrepresenting his knowledge of the program.
3. The raid on Gibson Guitar.  (We could almost call this the converse of Solyndra, holding companies whose executes donate to Republican candidates to a higher standard. With Solyndra et al., the Democratic administration doles out federal benefits out to their friends. Here, they use the full power of the federal government against those not deemed friendly enough.)
4. Politicized hiring in the Justice Department’s “career civil service ranks” where the president’s political appointees are trying to ensure that new (supposedly non-political) hires share the administration’s ideological outlook.

Wonder if beyond Jake Tapper and Sharryl Attkisson at CBSNews, anyone in the mainstream media will give these stories the treatment the Washington Post accorded a hunting camp with an offensive name in Texas or the Bush Administration exercising its constitutional authority in firing a handful of U.S. Attorneys.

Seems like we’ve got a “little homework assignment” for the mainstream media.

—–

*Or, should I say “presence” thereof.

NewsBusters (a site hosted by the Media Research Center) is always a great source to highlight the blatant leftist leaning of what used to be considered ‘mainstream’ media outlets. One of their most visited nemeses is Chris Matthews of MSNBC.

Their latest link for Matthews highlights his comments last night regarding Rep. Anthony Weiner’s current predicament. It’s titled “Matthews: Weiner in Trouble Because His Behavior Offends ‘Culturally Backward’ Christian Conservatives”, and naturally this insinuation by Matthews grabs the viewer for its obvious condescension and elitism. But it seems NewsBusters may have missed an even more curious comment from the huge-headed commentator. As you view the imbedded video, tell me if what Matthews says at 0:10 strikes you as well:

It’s getting very very hard to defend the behavior—politically—of the party. Now you throw on top of that, immoral behavior, indiscreet behavior, embarrassing behavior, gross behavior like this…”

(My emphasis)

Now? “NOW “?!

Where was Matthews when Rep. Massa was playing tickle-fight with his staffers and encountering Rahm Emanuel in the shower? Has he never heard of Barney Frank’s brothel? Elliot Spitzer, Jim McGreevey, and my God, Bill Clinton?!

“NOW“?!

Should we consider from Matthews that all these (and believe me, we could go on all day listing them, no?) dalliances pale in comparison with Weiner twitting pics of his unit to consenting, presumably adult ladies, and that this most recent embarrassment to the party of Jackson and Jefferson is finally the one that sends him over the edge?

Thank goodness for MRC and NewsBusters for watching his incoherent drivel so we don’t have to and can therefore enjoy the snippets of it for what they’re worth: a theater of the absurd.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Nick, seems Matthews believes 91% of Americans are “‘Culturally Backward’ Christian Conservatives” given that that percentage of our fellow citizens believe it is “morally wrong” for a married man (or woman) to have an affair.

Commenting on Democratic U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s statement today that his wife ““was not happy” when she learned this morning of his dishonesty, Jennifer Rubin asks, “Did she learn nothing from working for Hillary Clinton about enabling lying men?”

And didn’t Weiner, elected to Congress the year Mrs. Clinton’s husband lied about, then admitted to a sexual relationship with a White House intern, learn anything from his fellow Democrat’s experience?  Maybe, he thought that he too could get away with it, as the former president did.  Maybe he thought Democrats were immune from scandal.

Yet, with the new media, he should have learned that the game has changed.  He should have known the perils to a married public official of seeking out extramarital dalliances, even if such flirtations are never consummated.

To be sure, his statement today was laudatory.  He was forthright, didn’t pass the buck, appeared genuinely contrite, acknowledged the mistake he made and the pain he caused his family, particularly his wife.  Most importantly, he acknowledged that his own dishonesty last week made his mistake “worse.”

One wonders less at his judgment in engaging in on-line flirtation and more at his judgment not just in denying it, but in the manner of his denial.  Instead of merely saying that he had not tweeted the picture, he continued to deceive us in numerous public fora, including press conferences, public statements and media interviews.  It was as if he undertook a press tour entirely to deceive. (more…)

Stunned.  NOT!

From HotAir.com:

[T]he economists at e21 take a long look at a new study by Daniel Wilson at the San Francisco Fed on the effect on employment from the Obama administration’s stimulus plan, which indicates that the impact was a lot less than advertised.  Instead of adding two million jobs to the economy, the Fed finds that any new jobs added had disappeared by August of this year.

And from the e21 website….

Wilson’s study makes an important contribution to this debate by focusing on state-by-state comparisons. A large portion of stimulus funding at the state level was based on criteria that were entirely independent of the economic situation that states faced. For example, the number of existing highway miles was used to calculate additional transportation spending.

The study uses this resulting variation in state-level stimulus funding to determine what impact ARRA funding had on employment — including both the direct impact of workers hired to complete planned projects, as well as any broader spillover effects resulting from greater government spending. Administration economists have repeatedly emphasized the importance of this indirect employment growth in driving economic recovery.

The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs “created or saved” by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.

But we all knew this already didn’t we?  Read the whole thing!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

BREAKING: Ethics committee finds Rangel guilty

The Hill has more:

A House ethics panel has convicted Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) on 11 of 13 counts of violating House ethics rules.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the adjudicatory subcommittee and the full House ethics committee, announced the decision late Tuesday morning following an abbreviated public trial of the 20-term lawmaker and nearly six hours of deliberations.

The next step is to debate sanctions. Do wonder if the current Democratic majority will proceed with all deliberate speed so they can sanction their fellow partisan before the Republicans take over come January.

Just because the company that operates these voting machines has direct connections to corrupt Democrats in the state should be no reason to connect the “auto-Democrat” vote problems to tampering, right?  Nahhh.  (Email below from NC Republican Party)

The North Carolina Republican Party has been diligently investigating problems associated with voting machines, in particular iVotronic touch-screen voting machines in our state. These types of machines are in use in 35 of North Carolina’s 100 counties.  

Reports began to surface last week of voter’s intentions not being properly registered by these machines.   The specific incidents that first came to our attention were those who were attempting to cast a straight-ticket Republican vote but the machine was verifying that a straight-ticket Democratic vote had been registered. Fortunately, these initial voters were diligent in the verification process and after repeated attempts, called the problem to the attention of poll workers who assisted in making sure that the voter’s intentions were properly tallied.

Reports of similar problems began to come in from other parts of the state and at the time of this correspondence, (5pm October 28) we now have complaints from the counties New Hanover, Craven, Cumberland, Rutherford, Lenoir and Mecklenburg.   I want to stress that there may indeed be similar issues in other counties using these same machines. To date, all documented voter issues involve attempts to cast votes for Republicans and at least one voter was a registered Democrat who was attempting to vote a straight-ticket Republican ballot.

Attorneys working on behalf of the NCGOP have been in contact with the State Board of Elections as early as last week in hopes of rectifying this issue and clarifying the causes of these problems. To date, it is our opinion that sufficient effort or progress has not been made by the State Board of Elections to ensure the integrity of the voting process.  

For example, on Wednesday, October 27 the State Board of Elections conducted a informational session to instill voter confidence in Craven County, one of the first to report these problems.   Concerned citizens came to hear information on the documented reports of machines engaging in what is known as “vote flipping”, registering for the opposite party or candidate than the voters intention. Instead they were given a remedial demonstration as to the operation of the touch-screen machine.

When one citizen expressed frustration about the lack of answers to the obvious concerns of the majority in the room, he was told by the State Board of Elections official that she was only there to demonstrate the machine and if he didn’t like that, he could leave.

Just today [Thursday] in Craven County, two Republican poll workers were fired for talking to the media about the voting irregularities and what they claim was elections officials failure to properly address the issue.

Additional skepticism surrounds this situation due to the fact that the company responsible for the sale, distribution and maintenance of these machines has made headlines recently for questionable dealings in obtaining state contracts. Knowing that the ownership of the company in question, Printelect, has strong ties to the North Carolina Democratic Party and that the company itself holds a virtual monopoly on ballot printing and equipment maintenance for the state has only fueled suspicions.  

This morning [Thursday], NCGOP attorneys delivered a letter to the State Board of Elections demanding corrective action be taken immediately.  (a copy of that letter can be viewed here.)

Appearing that the State Board of Elections has no intentions of taking corrective action, the NCGOP is contemplating proceeding to Federal Court on Friday to seek appropriate action to ensure the validity of the voting process in North Carolina. A total of 65 counties in our state use paper ballots tabulated by optical scanners; universally considered to be highly accurate and efficient. It is not equitable that those voters leave the polling place with a higher level of confidence that the votes have been accurately recorded than those using touch-screen machines.

Make no mistake; the NCGOP will not stand idly by and watch one of the most important rights we hold as Americans become subject to at best, a random game of electronic chance and at worst, an effort to subvert the political process. 

Let’s hope the NCGOP gets on top of this.  This type of alleged tampering corrupts the confidence of those voters who expect the system is beyond reproach.   Why is it always that these machine glitches make automatic votes for the DEMOCRATS?  Funny that, eh?

-Bruce (GayPatriot)