Another corrupt Detroit politician finally gets what she deserves.
A federal judge has denied ex-Detroit Councilwoman Monica Conyers' request to withdraw her guilty plea in a corruption case and sentenced her to three years and one month in prison.
Conyers suggested she was the victim of "badgering" last summer when she acknowledged a conspiracy to take bribes for her support of a Houston company seeking a sludge contract from the city.
But U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn says her plea deal was voluntary.
Conyers, the wife of Michigan Democratic Congressman John Conyers, quit her council seat after pleading guilty.
The government urged the judge to consider other alleged crimes Wednesday. Prosecutors say Conyers and an aide collected $69,500 from people seeking help from the city.
Pass Obamacare and this record will be destroyed in a few months. The deliberate and reckless spending of the Obama Admin and the Dem Congress is turning America into a third world debtor.
The government racked up a record-high monthly budget deficit of $220.9 billion in February, the Treasury Department announced today.
The latest flood of red ink brings the total deficit for the first five months of the current fiscal year to $651 billion, far exceeding the $589 billion shortfall for the same timeframe in the last fiscal year.
The government ended the 2009 fiscal year with a record $1.4 trillion shortfall. The Obama administration has forecast a $1.56 trillion deficit for this year.
Right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing and once again Obama looks like a lying ass.
Sen. Dick Durbin, March 10, 2010: "Anyone who would stand before you and say 'well, if you pass health care reform next year's health care premiums are going down,' I don't think is telling the truth. I think it is likely they would go up."
Obama says....President Obama, March 8, 2010: "Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people’s premiums."
If Obama wants to know why America is thought of being weaker by the public, this is a good example of saying sorry to Gadhafi over abhorrent comments.
A senior State Department official said Tuesday he's sorry for a joking remark he made about Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi that prompted Libya to threaten diplomatic retaliation unless he apologized.
Chief department spokesman P.J. Crowley said he regretted any offense caused by his response to a reporter's question about Gadhafi's recent call for a holy war against Switzerland. Libya said last week it might take action against American business interests there if a formal apology was not made.
"I understand that my personal comments were perceived as a personal attack," Crowley told reporters. "The comments do not reflect U.S. policy and were not intended to offend. I apologize if they were taken that way. I regret that my comments have become an obstacle to further progress in our bilateral relationship."
Last week there were complaints of immigrant candidates in the Netherlands getting voted in over white candidates in the Labour Party. Now there is cry about voter fraud in Rotterdam that it has forced the Mayor to call for a recount mainly because of abuses that seemed to have happened in immigrant(Muslim) areas.
Despite the abuses at various polling stations, Aboutaleb saw no cause last week for a recount or for declaring the election invalid. They would not have had any influence on the ultimate division of the seats, he reasoned.
Aboutaleb yesterday maintained there had been no reason initially for a recount. "But signals of mistakes have subsequently come to light," he stated.
Boosted by immigrant votes, Labour (PvdA), the party of Morocco-born Aboutaleb, emerged as the biggest in Rotterdam with 28.9 percent of the vote. The rightwing Liveable Rotterdam, the white population's favourite, came second with 28.6 percent, a difference of only about 600 votes. Both won 14 seats, but PvdA, as the biggest party, has the initiative to form a coalition.
On the day of the elections, it had already emerged that many immigrant voters stood in the voting booth together, which is forbidden. Meanwhile, signals have also emerged of people voting two or three times, intimidation of Liveable Rotterdam voters on the street or in the voting booth, empty ballot boxes and people who voted for other people without showing ID.
I knew it was going to be anti-Bush all the time but Damon goes on a revisionist bender that seems astounding even for him.
Matt Damon plays Miller, an Army "chief" (chief warrant officer) assigned to searching for weapons of mass destruction in Baghdad in the opening days of the war in 2003.
The preposterous part comes in almost immediately: After Chief Miller comes up dry a couple of times, he decides to launch a one-man internal-affairs investigation into US intelligence-gathering.
He bypasses his chain of command, endangers good men (when one of his soldiers asks why he's following a random Iraqi into what could well be an ambush, Miller snaps, "Put your game face on") and forges a secret alliance against his fellow soldiers with a Baghdad CIA officer (Brendan Gleeson).
Despite being guilty of gross insubordination, lying to his superiors and concealing important evidence from them (a notebook containing the addresses of Saddam's top officers), Miller is the hero of the film.
Others we're supposed to cheer for include Sunni officers who shoot down helicopters carrying American soldiers sent to assassinate them. Those death squads are acting at the behest of a duplicitous Pentagon intelligence mandarin (Greg Kinnear) who has single-handedly drummed up a fake casus belli.
Movies like "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted" have shown US forces doing nasty things -- but none went anywhere near as far as this picture in suggesting original sin corrupted the entire Iraq war and that American officials are more blameworthy than the insurgents for the most violent years.
"Green Zone" isn't cinema. It's slander. It will go down in history as one of the most egregiously anti-American movies ever released by a major studio.
Maybe Obama ass kissing apology tour, trying to close Gitmo and generally looking weak in international affairs like getting snubbed at the Olympics has that effect on people.
A majority of Americans say the United States is less respected in the world than it was two years ago and think President Obama and other Democrats fall short of Republicans on the issue of national security, a new poll finds.
The Democracy Corps-Third Way survey released Monday finds that by a 10-point margin -- 51 percent to 41 percent -- Americans think the standing of the U.S. dropped during the first 13 months of Mr. Obama's presidency.
"This is surprising, given the global acclaim and Nobel peace prize that flowed to the new president after he took office," said pollsters for the liberal-leaning organizations.
On the national security front, a massive gap has emerged, with 50 percent of likely voters saying Republicans would likely do a better job than Democrats, a 14-point swing since May. Thirty-three percent favored Democrats.
"The erosion since May is especially strong among women, and among independents, who now favor Republicans on this question by a 56 to 20 percent margin," the pollsters said in their findings.
The murderous Winnie whines about Nelson Mandela being a corporate sellout.
Nelson Mandela has been accused by his former wife of betraying South Africa's black population.
In a savage attack, Winnie Mandela said he had done nothing for the poor and should not have accepted the Nobel peace prize with the man who jailed him, FW de Klerk.
The 73-year-old said her ex-husband had become a 'corporate foundation' who was 'wheeled out' only to raise money for the ANC party he once led.
....Mrs Mandela criticised her country's Truth and Reconciliation Committee - which she appeared before in 1997 and which implicated her in gross violations of human rights.
She said: 'What good does the truth do? How does it help to anyone to know where and how their loved ones are killed or buried?
'That Bishop Tutu who turned it all into a religious circus came here. He had a cheek to tell me to appear.
'I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting there because of our struggle and me. Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has no control or say any more.
'They put that huge statue of him right in the middle of the most affluent white area of Johannesburg. Not here [in Soweto] where we spilled our blood.
'Mandela is now like a corporate foundation. He is wheeled out globally to collect the money.'
In case anyone forgot what a vile woman Winnie Mandela is but still be treated with respect is shocking.
Mrs Mandela became notorious in 1991 when she was jailed for six years for the kidnap of Stompie Moeketsi - a sentence later cut to a fine.
Stompie, 14, had been murdered three years earlier by members of Mrs Mandela's bodyguard, the Mandela United Football Club.
She also caused outrage by endorsing the punishment of apartheid collaborators with ' necklacing' - putting burning tyres around their necks.
More details.In the late Eighties, Winnie's thuggish bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club, terrorised Soweto. Club "captain" was Jerry Richardson, who died in prison last year while serving life for the murder of Stompie Moeketsi, a 14-year-old who was kidnapped with three other boys and beaten in the home where we would soon sit, sipping coffee. Winnie was sentenced to six years for kidnap, which was reduced to a fine on appeal.
Members of the gang would later testify to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Winnie had ordered the torture, murder and kidnap of her own people, and even participated directly.
That bring me to the next question on why she was given such a high profile celebration for remembering "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama? Since when is it okay for such important civil rights events to be soiled with the
presence of this woman?Why is Roland Martin going to interview her as well when she should be shunned?
None of this is defensible in any manner.
I am trying to figure out does this mean anyone can claim their human rights are being violated and allowed in the UK?
Rapper Snoop Dogg has humiliated ministers by winning a three-year legal battle to overturn a ban on him entering the U.K.
In an embarrassing defeat for the Home Office, the American hip hop star successfully claimed the ban infringed his human right to freedom of expression.
It means that Snoop - who has a string of criminal convictions and has been tried for murder - could be free to return to Britain as early as Thursday.
The Government's unsuccessful legal battle - which cost the UK taxpayer in excess of £100,000 - has been criticised as 'an appalling waste of public money' by the rapper's lawyer.
And the fact that an immigration tribunal has ruled in the musician's favour could impact on Britain's ability to keep so-called 'undesirables' out of the country
Why? This would be another layer of bureaucracy and expense when you already have the laws and means in place to combat illegal immigration. Instead of putting more burden on American citizens and workers legal to be here put the effort on the illegals for once.
Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.
The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.
"It's the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. "If you say they can't get a job when they come here, you'll stop it."
Yet another Dem sex scandal in the making with a NYTIMES reporter no less which should bring up some interesting reporting conflicts.
Gossip columnists are reporting that CNBC Washington correspondent and New York Times writer John Harwood has split from his wife, Frankie Blackburn, because of his alleged affair with Senator Cantwell.
The details of the supposed affair have not been released other than that the two have dated.
These allegations have not been confirmed by either source but according to 'Page Six,' the online gossip magazine, Harwood has said, "I don't feel comfortable talking about my family life."
Sources also say Harwood 'sobbed' to a DC paper asking to keep his affair quiet and out of the paper.
This would be the second time that Cantwell has played the other woman is a whore role if the allegations are true.
Just me or has the spotlight on black politicians gotten brighter over the last month?
On Friday, the D.C. Council appointed a special counsel to investigate the Fenty administration's awarding of $86 million in construction projects at city parks and recreation centers without the council's approval, which is required on contracts exceeding $1 million. The investigator is expected to examine whether the city showed favoritism to the mayor's friends in awarding the deals.
The mayor's friends were relatively unknown before Fenty's rise: engaged in neighborhood activism, working for a developer or running a nightclub or a landscaping business. After Fenty became mayor, the men prospered, starting or expanding companies that have repeatedly landed development and construction projects awarded by the D.C. government.
Karim's roster includes a $4.2 million contract to oversee renovation of at least 16 parks and recreation centers. The Fenty administration did not seek council approval for that contract but now says it should have done so.
Politicians have long cultivated circles of lawyers, developers and lobbyists who, in turn, thrive on access to government's highest levels. But Fenty's friends have risen from obscurity at a pace that has captured the attention of the political and business establishments and fostered an image that is seemingly at odds with Fenty's campaign themes of reform and transparency.
"They're suddenly doing so well at the trough of government," said D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3). "There's this network where they all help each other. They all get rich together. It makes you wonder what's going on. What we know is they're friends of Fenty."
The best way is to let it correct themselves now this is a small reward for owners underwater and those who paid too much in the first place. Then you have the spectre of fraud when it comes to the value of the house.
In an effort to end the foreclosure crisis, the Obama administration has been trying to keep defaulting owners in their homes. Now it will take a new approach: paying some of them to leave.
This latest program, which will allow owners to sell for less than they owe and will give them a little cash to speed them on their way, is one of the administration’s most aggressive attempts to grapple with a problem that has defied solutions.
More than five million households are behind on their mortgages and risk foreclosure. The government’s $75 billion mortgage modification plan has helped only a small slice of them. Consumer advocates, economists and even some banking industry representatives say much more needs to be done.
For the administration, there is also the concern that millions of foreclosures could delay or even reverse the economy’s tentative recovery — the last thing it wants in an election year.
....Under the new federal program, a lender will use real estate agents to determine the value of a home and thus the minimum to accept. This figure will not be shared with the owner, but if an offer comes in that is equal to or higher than this amount, the lender must take it.
Mr. Paul, the Phoenix agent, was skeptical. “In a perfect world, this would work,” he said. “But because estimates of value are inherently subjective, it won’t. The banks don’t want to sell at a discount.”
There are myriad other potential conflicts over short sales that may not be solved by the program, which was announced on Nov. 30 but whose details are still being fine-tuned. Many would-be short sellers have second and even third mortgages on their houses. Banks that own these loans are in a position to block any sale unless they get a piece of the deal.
“You have one loan, it’s no sweat to get a short sale,” said Howard Chase, a Miami Beach agent who says he does around 20 short sales a month. “But the second mortgage often is the obstacle.”
China has a better grasp on financing than us now.
March 8 (Bloomberg) -- China plans to nullify all guarantees local governments have provided for loans taken by their financing vehicles as concerns about credit risks on such debt increases.
The Ministry of Finance will also ban all future guarantees by local governments and legislatures in rules that may be issued as early as this month, Yan Qingmin, head of the banking regulator’s Shanghai branch, said in an interview. The ministry held meetings on the rules on Feb. 25 with regulators including the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the People’s Bank of China, Yan said March 5.
China’s local governments are raising funds through investment vehicles to circumvent regulations that prevent them from borrowing directly. A crackdown on such loans, estimated at about 11.4 trillion yuan ($1.7 trillion) at the end of 2009 by Northwestern University Professor Victor Shih, could trigger a “gigantic wave” of bad debts as projects are left without funding, Shih said this month.
“By striking the fear of God into lenders, regulators hope to get them to turn off the tap,” said Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “Banks have lent on the assumption that a lot of these infrastructure projects are risk-free, but many had no creditworthiness beside the guarantees.”
I wanted to seperate Hastings from the rest of the story, but so far this doesn't rise up to the heights of the UK expense scandal but its pretty damn close how taxpayer's money is being used by Congress who even gave themselves a expense raise.
When Corrine Brown, a Democrat from North Florida, traveled on congressional business, she used a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car and an SUV at a cost of nearly $8,000.
And Tom Rooney, a House Republican from the Treasure Coast, spent about $2,500 to maintain an aquarium in his office.
To government watchdogs monitoring how our tax dollars are spent, the expenditures suggest that some members of Congress are out of touch with the financial hardships facing many of their constituents.
"Shame on our congressmen and [congresswomen] to be so insensitive to the plight of Floridians and Americans who can barely make ends meet," said Dominic Calabro, president of Florida TaxWatch. "It's absolutely the wrong message at the wrong time."
Pete Sepp, spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union in Alexandria, Va., said lawmakers may not understand why "people could be upset over a few thousand dollars out of a budget of trillions, but it shouldn't surprise them."
"It is a very important symbol of the federal government's overall behavior to watch the p's and q's on office expenditures," Sepp said. "It's one of the few costs of government that people can relate to directly."
And it adds up to more than $1 billion a year.
Read the whole thing.
The joys on being a congress critter on the taxpayer's dime. She pretty much as that job for life because the way the district is cut up, Hastings will never be voted out.
Job losses, home foreclosures and the worst economy in decades have forced many Americans to cut back or do without.
But not members of Congress, who voted themselves a 5 percent increase in their own budgets for staff salaries, office expenses and perks last year.
U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Miramar Democrat, paid two staffers about $160,000 apiece — and one of them was his longtime girlfriend.
....Florida's highest-spending House member was Hastings, who went through 96.5 percent of his allowance, while the most frugal, Adam Putnam, a Central Florida Republican, used 75.6 percent of his budget. The top 10 spenders were evenly split among Democrats and Republicans.
....Most Florida representatives employed one high-earning staffer. But Hastings had two near the top of the pay scale: Chief of Staff Arthur Kennedy and Deputy District Director Patricia Williams, the congressman's girlfriend of many years.
The House nepotism rule prevents lawmakers from hiring relatives, including spouses, in-laws, aunts, uncles and even cousins. But it does not exclude significant unmarried others.
Williams began working for the representative after he was first elected in 1992. She's a disbarred lawyer who represented Hastings in the 1980s, when he was tried and acquitted of accepting bribes as a federal judge and subsequently impeached and removed from the bench.
Williams' pay has gone up more than 30 percent since 2002, according to LegiStorm, a nonpartisan group that tracks congressional salaries.
Hastings' office did not respond to several e-mails or phone messages seeking comment.
What seems to be a good sign in the local elections.
Immigrant voters have again provided important support for Labour (PvdA) in the local elections. Moroccans in particular voted for the party en masse, according to research by Amsterdam city council and the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies of the University of Amsterdam.
The PvdA remained the biggest party in Amsterdam by some way, partly due to 74 percent of Moroccans voting for the social democrats. Among Ghanaians, a big group in the Zuidoost district, the figure was even 88 percent. Among Surinamese and Antilleans, the PvdA 'only' won 53 percent, De Volkskrant reported yesterday. It gave no figures for Turks.
What it signals to
the white leftists.The majority of immigrants voted for the PvdA. They generally choose a compatriot. As a result, Turkish and Moroccan candidates put at unelectable levels on the party candidate lists were nonetheless elected in Wednesday's elections. Thanks to a large number of preference votes from compatriots, they elbowed aside the white candidates above them on the lists.
This has given rise to turmoil within the PvdA. "We have become the Party for the Immigrants" rather than the Party for Labour, said Andre Boersma bluntly (in Dutch: Partij van de Allochtonen and Partij van de Arbeid, both PvdA in short). Boersma was a PvdA council member in Enschede, but now has to leave.
The social democrats won 9 seats in Enschede on Wednesday, of which four will be filled by immigrants that were low down on the election list, but climbed spectacularly thanks to preference votes. Of these four, only one, Shridath Salikram, has council experience. Preference votes also put him on the municipal council four years ago.
.....The local PvdA leader is also an immigrant, Seyit Yeyden, but he is not happy with this development. "Let's face it: it is not a good mix this way. A number of outstanding candidates have now been elbowed out. We also have no woman in the party. But still, the voter decides."
So it fine if the immigrants vote for the party but when they predictably vote tribally now its time to get upset.
In a shopping center parking lot.
A Los Angeles Muslim civil rights organization has filed a misconduct complaint and requested an internal investigation of police in Henderson, Nev., after seven Southern California Muslim men were detained and questioned for praying in a parking lot.
The men were driving through Henderson on Dec. 20 when they stopped for food and gas at a shopping center, according to the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
While stopped, the men prayed next to their vehicle. Two patrol officers soon arrived – followed by a police sergeant, according to a Henderson police spokesman.
“We got a call from a citizen saying that seven suspicious males [were] in a parking lot engaging in suspicious behavior," said Officer Todd Rasmussen, a department spokesman.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations alleges that one of the officers said he was responding to a call about a “bunch of guys doing weird moves."
Muslim prayer is conducted by a series of movements that include bending down and prostrating on the ground.
The officers did a cursory search of the men's vehicle and questioned them about their jobs, schooling and places of birth for more than half an hour, according to the complaint filed by the Muslim civil rights group.
“The scope and length of the stop was not reasonable under the circumstances, nor did it serve any legitimate investigative purpose,” Ameena Qazi, a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, wrote to Henderson Police Chief Jutta Chambers.
In addition to an investigation, the Muslim civil rights group has asked for disciplinary action against the officers, changes in officer training and compensation for the emotional distress suffered by the Muslim men. |
This is some ghetto behavior, no learned Muslim with any self-respect is going to start praying in a public parking lot as if they own the place. It is allowable to double up on prayers when you get to your destination or even miss a prayer when circumstances arises. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a publicity stunt which CAIR will gleefully move along to push for more exceptions to Islamic practices.
This is the sort of nonsense you expect from Muslims coming from the hardline middle east who pray in public
in places like Europe. It should be unacceptable behavior here in America.
Via Consumerist.
So cold and yet so gold.
You would think that would give Obama pause but to his liberal worldview this is just a bump in the road to change America. The end result is more people will be hooked on big government which works out well for Dems.
A new congressional report released Friday says the United States' long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama's grim budget submission last month.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama's budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That's $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.
The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration's. That's because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House.
The deficit picture has turned alarmingly worse since the recession that started at the end of 2007, never dipping below 4 percent of the size of the economy over the next decade. Economists say that deficits of that size are unsustainable and could put upward pressure on interest rates, crowd out private investment in the economy and ultimately erode the nation's standard of living.
Still, the Feb. 1 White House budget plan was a largely stand-pat document that avoided difficult decisions on curbing the unsustainable growth of federal benefit programs like the Medicare health care program for the elderly and Medicaid, which provides health care to the poor and disabled.
I won't be surprised when a pic of him sitting in the oval office comes out.
I doubt he thinks he will get any traction on this issue this year but as a election wedge to gin up hispanic votes who want a blanket amnesty bill he will take it.
Reporting from Washington — Despite steep odds, the White House has discussed prospects for reviving a major overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, a commitment that President Obama has postponed once already.
Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections.
In the session, Obama and members of his Domestic Policy Council outlined ways to resuscitate the effort in a White House meeting with two senators -- Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- who have spent months trying to craft a bill.
According to a person familiar with the meeting, the White House may ask Schumer and Graham to at least produce a blueprint that could be turned into legislative language.
The basis of a bill would include a path toward citizenship for the 10.8 million people living in the U.S. illegally. Citizenship would not be granted lightly, the White House said. Undocumented workers would need to register, pay taxes and pay a penalty for violating the law. Failure to comply might result in deportation.
Considering the thousands of dollars most illegals pay to cross the border, registering, paying some taxes and small penalty is ridiculously easy and a slap in the face of those of us who did it the right way.
