Free Republic

Someone submit the Morning Joe java to Henry Waxman for analysis. There seems to be something in it causing top Dems to experience serious delusions . . . On today's show, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius claimed that the people of her home state of Kansas are "wildly supportive" of the substance of ObamaCare. Unfortunately, suggested Sebelius, they're just too ignorant to know what's in the blessed bill. Later, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine didn't deny that the Obama admin had engaged in two sleazy patronage deals, involving Joe Sestak and Scott Matheson. Instead, the DNC Chairman laughed off the cynical, and...

Ambassadors: Do patronage picks matter? Obama continues tradition — so far, more than half are political nominees By Domenico Montanaro Political Researcher NBC News WASHINGTON - American presidents rewarding top campaign fundraisers with plum ambassadorships has long been common practice for both Democrats and Republicans alike. But President Obama, who has vowed to “change the ways of Washington,” has not only continued this tradition of his predecessors, he has outpaced them. So far, 57% of Obama’s picks for ambassador positions — 34 of 60 — have been political appointees, or people not considered career Foreign Service, according to the American...

The Swift Economy of Colonial Justice Here are just a few incidents of crime and punishment as they were administered throughout the colonies in the years 1768 through 1770 and chronicled by the Portsmouth New Hampshire Gazette. Contrary to what you might assume, crime was not a major feature of colonial newspapers. In this era, correspondents were far more interested in political intrigue and the ideas surrounding the rights of free men. You have to really look, in other words, for a crime blotter, and when crime was reported, unlike today, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end....

Ben Stein stated an old friend of Obama from Chicago that will oversee the Cap and Trade fiasco will benefit greatly from doing it. Was he talking financially? It appeared so. Ben Stein said this is a huge scandal, and he could not remember the guys name. Beck said they will look into it and cover it tomorrow.

The son of embattled Sen. Roland Burris is a federal tax deadbeat who landed a $75,000-a-year state job under former Gov. Rod Blagojevich five months ago, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned. Blagojevich's administration hired Roland W. Burris II as a senior counsel for the state's housing authority Sept. 10 -- about six weeks after the Internal Revenue Service slapped a $34,163 tax lien on Burris II and three weeks after a mortgage company filed a foreclosure suit on his South Side house.

     Amid the furor over controversies regarding Cabinet-nominee tax problems and the seismic battle over a nearly trillion-dollar economic rescue bill, President Obama made a little-noticed appointment that is now generating intrigue.     Shauna Daly, a 29-year-old Democratic operative, was named last month to the new job of White House counsel research director. Though she is inside one of the most powerful legal offices in the land, Miss Daly holds no law degree and doesn't list any legal training on her resume. -snip-     "Daly does not have the qualifications to be holding a significant position in the White House...

VIDEO AT LINK

Click on the Stimulus Watch link. Select your state, and then click on your town of city. If you do this before calling or faxing your Senator, you will have VERY GOOD AMMO. It lists ALL of the local area projects in the Porkalus Bill for your reference.

She hasn’t shown up for work very regularly over the last year or so, so when Michelle Obama’s $300,000 job was cut at the University of Chicago Hospitals, it may have been hard to notice the difference.

Perhaps no governor has rewarded so many supporters with so much. Five years ago, just eight of Gov. Bill Richardson's political appointees made more than $100,000 a year. Today, more than 100 earn at least that much. Also up under Richardson: the number of gubernatorial political appointees, formally known as exempt employees. In his first 15 months in office, the number of appointees scattered throughout government grew from 167 to 307. Today, there are 468 gubernatorial appointees in exempt positions. That growth in the patronage, or spoils, system of state government is one of the legacies of Richardson as he...

President-elect Barack Obama's top adviser and chief political strategist, David Axelrod, penned an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune in 2005 that could come back to haunt Obama as the investigation into disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich goes ahead. In the article, Axelrod, who was a political adviser to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley before becoming the architect of Obama's presidential campaign, wrote that trading political jobs for favors is a perfectly acceptable practice and part of the way American democracy works. "The democratic process is often messy. Diverse constituencies fight fiercely for their priorities. Their elected representatives use the influence they...

Barack Obama’s election with the middle name Hussein (invoked to rile Republican crowds during the presidential campaign) should inspire Muslims to pursue public service and other work, even if they speak with accents or their names are perceived as foreign-sounding, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison told the recent annual meeting of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, followed up on CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad’s plea for Obama to hire Muslims to federal posts by urging American Muslims to apply for some of the administration’s 8,000 job openings.

Axe ripped Fitzgerald’s patronage purge By: Kenneth P. Vogel December 9, 2008 07:08 PM EST Patrick Fitzgerald’s charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have drawn a chorus of shock and outrage. But Barack Obama’s message man David Axelrod once staked out a much more nuanced position on Fitzgerald’s anti-corruption crusade. In a 2005 op-ed, Axelrod argued, in effect, that trading political favors – including jobs – is part of the grease that makes government work. He ripped Fitzgerald at the time for trying “to use the criminal code to enforce (his) vision” of “entirely remov(ing) politics from government.” The piece...

The incoming Obama administration has notified all politically-appointed ambassadors that they must vacate their posts as of Jan. 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office, a State Department official said. The clean slate will open up prime opportunities for the president-elect to reward political supporters with posts in London, Paris, Tokyo and the like. The notice to diplomatic posts was issued this week. Political ambassadors sometimes are permitted to stay on briefly during a new administration, but the sweeping nature of the directive suggests that Obama has little interest in retaining any of Bush's ambassadorial appointees.

300,000 Apply for 3,300 Obama Jobs By NEIL A. LEWIS WASHINGTON — Brenda Benton, a veteran media relations employee with the Los Angeles Police Department, is now part of a record-breaking political phenomenon. Ms. Benton was so thrilled with the election of Barack Obama as president that she has become one of about 300,000 people who have, so far, put themselves forward for posts in the new administration. At the equivalent time in the George W. Bush transition eight years ago, with his election still in dispute, there were about 44,000 applicants, according to Clay Johnson, who led the Bush...

The president of the Illinois Senate is sitting in his statehouse office, talking in gravelly tones about political strategies and counter-strategies. Out of nowhere, the theme from "The Godfather" begins playing. It turns out to be the ringtone on his cell phone - an appropriate song for the man who amounts to Barack Obama's political godfather. Emil Jones Jr. helped Obama master the intricacies of the Legislature. When Democrats took control of the state Senate, Jones, though he risked offending colleagues who had toiled futilely on key issues under Republican rule, tapped Obama to take the lead on high-profile legislative...

SANTA FE— Gov. Bill Richardson and leading state lawmakers quarreled Friday over a Legislative Finance Committee audit critical of the state Personnel Office. "Nitpicking" is how Richardson described the report released Thursday. ..." But lawmakers said the problems identified at the Personnel Office were significant, not trivial. One lawmaker even went so far as to attribute Richardson's testiness to presidential politics. "What do you expect from someone running for president. He wants to be untainted," said Rep. Luciano "Lucky" Varela, D-Santa Fe, the committee's vice chairman. "These are factual reports." The report said the Personnel Office had deviated from hiring...

The most dangerous job in America? Underground coal miner? Foundry worker? City workers with political clout claim to be injured at a rate that far exceeds any occupation tracked by the U.S. Department of Labor, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times that raises questions about whether all those city workers really were injured, and whether the city adequately investigates workplace accidents. Could so many patronage workers really be getting hurt on the job? Greg Krohm doesn't think so. "This is buffoonery," said Krohm, executive director of the International Association of Industrial Accident Boards and Commissions, in Madison,...

From the time Mayor Richard Daley took office, dozens of city department managers gathered before elections at the plumbers' union hall or other sites to get campaign marching orders from top mayoral aides, a former Daley loyalist testified Monday in the City Hall corruption trial. Donald Tomczak, a longtime Water Department official and veteran political operative, said he then would summon his top deputies to his office in the Jardine Filtration Plant to tell them which candidates would get help from hundreds of blue-collar city water workers. After elections, Daley aide Robert Sorich fielded requests for promotions from the political...

In contrast to recent revelations of national security leaks occurring within the CIA, consider the absurdly trivial and wholly unsubstantiated charges that ultimately drove House Majority Leader Tom Delay from office. After presenting a vapid case before numerous grand juries who could find absolutely no fault with Delay, Democrat Prosecutor Ronnie Earl finally landed one that was willing to hand down an indictment for violation of laws that did not exist at the time that Delay was accused of violating them. Despite this, Delay has since faced relentless attacks from the liberal political machine, abetted by the leftist media, insisting...