A prominent big-city mayor who served nearly three decades in the U.S. House and headed its powerful Armed Services Committee owes nearly a quarter of a million dollars in back income taxes even though his annual salary and congressional pension amount to almost $300,000. 

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums failed to pay income taxes for at least three years and owes Uncle Sam $239,000, according to a local news report that reminds the flashy veteran politician that being a tax delinquent violates his civic duty as both a public official and a citizen.

It’s not like Dellums doesn’t make a decent living. His annual salary for being mayor of California’s eighth-largest city is $184,000 and his congressional pension is more than $100,000 a year. After leaving congress Dellums opened a Washington D.C. lobbying firm that made big bucks though the money stopped flowing when he left the business to run for office in his native Oakland. 

He still makes more than most Americans but he also spends extravagantly, often with a city credit card. It turns out the mayor has expensive taste and he’s been in trouble for using taxpayer dollars to pick up some hefty questionable tabs. Dellums only wears fancy tailored suits, stays at the most lavish resorts, dines only at the finest restaurants and often gets around in a chauffeured limousine.  

An investigation last year determined that Dellums has a pattern of exorbitant spending at taxpayer expense and that he also cheated the public by working significantly less than eight hours at least a full third of all the days he supposedly worked. The probe was revealed at a time when the mayor suggested shutting down City Hall and raising taxes to help offset a financial crisis.  

While Oakland faced a $14.5 million deficit, its tax-cheating mayor was dining at upscale eateries, staying at five-star hotels during numerous jaunts away from the city and buying hundreds of dollars worth of flowers. Taxpayers in the notoriously crime-infested San Francisco Bay city picked up the rather excessive tab. 

A relatively new federal program that allows illegal immigrants to use their American-born anchor babies to collect welfare for the entire family has expanded nationwide and nearly doubled in a western state that already spends hundreds of millions of dollars to provide undocumented residents with public services. 

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) was created by the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services a few years ago so that illegal aliens could get monthly welfare checks to help support the entire family. It is the only public assistance program where parents can apply in their children’s name as opposed to applying in their own. It also does not require parents to demonstrate that they are in the U.S. legally since most aren’t. 

In Nevada alone, the TANF program’s caseload has grown 96% since the recession hit the state like an atomic bomb two years ago. A news report reveals that around 4,250 of the families receiving the benefit in Nevada have “mixed immigration status.” In other words, U.S. taxpayers are supporting thousands of illegal alien families because they have at least one anchor baby. 

Nevada already blows a whopping $630 million a year to provide its rapidly growing illegal immigrant population with public services that should be reserved for legal U.S. residents. The Silver State spends $470 million annually to educate the children of illegal immigrants in public schools and an additional $45 million for limited English programs. Eighty five million goes to healthcare for illegal immigrants and $31 to incarcerate them.

Illegal aliens are also largely responsible for Nevada’s home foreclosure crisis, reportedly the nation’s worst. Around 5 million fraudulent mortgages nationwide are in the hands of illegal aliens, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and it is no secret that a substantial chunk of them are in Nevada. 

Forced by a legal settlement to disclose White House visitors, the Obama Administration has reluctantly revealed a smidgen of the high-dollar fundraisers, lobbyists and celebrities who have visited the executive mansion and disputed the identities of various controversial figures.

Never the less, the administration is shamelessly touting the publication of its selective visitor list as “transparency like you’ve never seen before” even though it includes only 110 names out of the hundreds of thousands who have been to the White House since Obama moved in. The list includes executives of bailed-out banks, Washington’s biggest Democratic lobbyists, renowned civil rights leaders, famous athletes, Hollywood stars and major donors. 

Obama warns that familiar names that appear on the list are not who you think they are. For instance, a William Ayers who visited the White House is not the domestic terrorist and one-time fugitive who has long supported and bankrolled Obama’s political career. The president supposedly severed ties with the Vietnam-era radical who admitted planting bombs on the Capitol, Pentagon and other government buildings when the close friendship created a public relations nightmare during the presidential election.  

The Jeremiah Wright on the heavily redacted list isn’t the incendiary, race-bating pastor who blames the U.S. for causing the 2001 terrorist attacks and damns America for treating blacks less than human. That controversial figure has known Obama for years, conducted his marriage ceremony, baptized his daughters and served as a presidential campaign and spiritual advisor but he has not stepped foot in the White House. That was another Jeremiah Wright, according to the president’s people.  

Obama released the names to settle the public records requests of various groups, including Judicial Watch. The administration claims the records are not public and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act even though a federal judge has twice ruled that all White House visitor logs are indeed public. To appease the groups, Obama is releasing a tiny fraction of the visitors but will keep secret logs from his first eight months in office. 

Regardless, the administration is brazenly hailing the partial disclosure as a major milestone in government transparency and the latest in a series of unprecedented steps by the president to increase openness in government.

For the second time in less than a month, a federal officer with the key Homeland Security agency patrolling the U.S. border has been criminally charged for smuggling illegal immigrants from Mexico.

Just a few weeks ago, a separate Texas Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent was indicted for bribery and conspiracy to unlawfully transport aliens by the same Houston federal prosecutor’s office. Authorities say that veteran CBP agent (Javier Cavazos) took cash from at least one illegal immigrant in exchange for admission into the U.S. He faces more than a decade in prison.

In an unrelated scheme, the second border agent (Rudy Soliz), who was arrested late last week, was charged with transporting an undocumented alien into the U.S. and conspiracy. Soliz is an 11-year veteran of the agency that protects the nation’s borders from terrorism, human and drug smuggling and illegal migration. He resigned upon being arrested and faces a maximum of a decade in prison. 

These two cases are part of a growing epidemic of corruption among U.S. law enforcement officials who work along the Mexican border. Government data revealed earlier this year that local police, elected sheriffs and federal officers are collaborating in record numbers with Mexican smugglers who bribe them with cash and sometimes sexual favors.

The crisis has hit CBP, the nation’s largest law enforcement organization, especially hard. Created after the 2001 terrorist attacks to be the unified border agency, CBP has seen the number of officers charged with corruption nearly triple in one year. During a recent 10-month period alone, nearly two dozen CBP agents have been criminally charged. 

Fraud was so rampant last year that the government created an internal web site devoted to convicted border agents and the agency began administering lie detector tests to ensure future applicants didn’t already work for Mexican smuggling organizations. It marked a shameful chapter for CBP, which combines the inspectional and border forces of U.S. Customs, U.S. Immigration, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services and the U.S. Border Patrol.

Under fire for failing to act against corrupt lawmakers, the notoriously remiss House Ethics Committee is in fact scrutinizing dozens of legislators, according to a highly confidential memorandum that mysteriously appeared this week. 

Washington D.C.’s largest newspaper reports that an internal memo, inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, indicates that the ethics committee is in fact hard at work and not comatose. The conveniently timed “security breach” comes amid heightened criticism of the committee’s well-documented foot-dragging.  

A low-level staff member, whose name has not been released, has been blamed for the breach and subsequently fired, according to the news report. Working from home, the now unemployed staffer improperly placed a document listing the ethic committee’s inquiries into a file-sharing software system accessible to the public. 

The private report reveals that more than 30 lawmakers and several aides are being investigated for a variety of issues, including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling. Among them are five Democrats (John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, Peter J. Visclosky of Indiana, James P. Moran of Virginia, Norm Dicks of Washington and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio) and two Republicans (Todd Tiahrt of Kansas and C. W. Bill Young of Florida) under probe for giving earmarks to military contractors at the request of a politically-connected lobbying firm. 

California Democrat Maxine Waters, a senior member of the congressional committee handling the financial crisis, is also under investigation for shamelessly steering federal bailout funds to her husband’s bank and House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel is being probed for hiding hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets and evading taxes. Ironically, the New York Democrat chairs the House committee that writes the nation’s tax code.

But these are just probes that may never lead to any action against the offender. After all, the investigators are the friends and colleagues of the scrutinized subjects. Sometimes they’re financial beneficiaries. For instance, Rangel has given hefty campaign contributions to the members charged with investigating him. Since his ethics probes began last fall, Rangel has covertly donated money to 119 members of congress, including three of the five Democrats (Kentucky’s Ben Chandler, North Carolina’s G.K. Butterfield and Vermont’s Peter Welch) on the House Ethics Committee who are working on his case. 

A group of illegal immigrants recently spared deportation by a sympathetic Connecticut judge are suing the federal agents that arrested them, claiming their constitutional rights were violated in the raids that led to their apprehension.

The illegal aliens, who live in New Haven, assert in a federal lawsuit that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violated their rights during an early-morning fugitive operation in 2007 that led to the arrest of 30 people. Seventeen of them were subsequently charged with being in the U.S. illegally and a group of law students from a nearby Ivy League university represented them pro bono.

In August a federal judge (Michael Straus) in Connecticut blocked the deportation of four of the illegal aliens, ruling that their constitutional rights were “egregiously violated” because immigration agents entered their apartments without a warrant, probable cause or consent. Besides terminating removal proceedings, the judge suppressed any evidence gathered by federal agents because the illegal aliens’ constitutional protections to due process were violated.  

Evidently emboldened by the ruling, the illegal immigrants are now suing the agents who conducted the raids, their supervisors and senior ICE officials. Weapons drawn, agents entered the illegal aliens’ homes without cause, consent or search warrants, according to the complaint filed this week. It further says that authorities had not previously determined that most of the arrested were in violation of immigration law and therefore had no reason to assume that they lacked legal status. 

The lawsuit also declares that the feds deliberately conducted raids in New Haven to retaliate against the city for its well-known efforts to accommodate illegal immigrants. A few years ago New Haven became the nation’s first to offer illegal aliens official identification cards so that they can enjoy public services and integrate into the community. San Francisco followed its lead and began offering illegal immigrants ID cards this year.  

After a lively eight-day trial a federal jury took less than two hours to convict the deplorable mayor of Alabama’s largest city of 60 corruption charges, including bribery, conspiracy, fraud and money laundering. 

Disgraced Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford, a former Jefferson County commissioner and heavyweight in the local Democratic Party, orchestrated a massive pay-to-play scheme in which he traded hefty bribes for coveted public contracts worth millions of dollars. The veteran lawmaker took at least a quarter of a million dollars in cash and other gifts, including jewelry and fancy clothes.

Before the trial started an investment banker and a lobbyist had pleaded guilty to bribing Langford and both offered damaging testimony in court. The banker’s bribe assured that his firm was included in county bond deals and interest-rate swaps that earned his business more than $7 million. The shady deals have left the county on the verge of bankruptcy.

Langford, a powerful fixture in local politics for more than three decades, was immediately removed from office and faces decades in prison. He plans to appeal and claims he’s been treated worst than a famous child-molesting serial killer (Jeffrey Dahmer) who murdered 17 men and boys before getting caught in 1991. Langford isn’t a cannibalistic assassin like Dahmer but he’s clearly no saint. A local newspaper has documented the politician’s corruption in a detailed series called the Langford Files. 

Eager to defend her beloved husband, Langford’s emotional wife (Melva) guaranteed her hubby’s innocence and played the race card, claiming that “only in Alabama can a black man not get a fair trial.” Scurrying away from the courthouse after the verdict, she added that the Justice Department has been “conspiring and working hard to get my husband.”

The White House is blasting a national print media outlet for reporting that the president’s fraud-infested economic recovery plan has inflated by thousands the number of jobs created or saved nationwide.

First Camp Obama admonished a conservative leaning television network (Fox) and now the notoriously liberal Associated Press. The most “transparent” administration in history responds to negative media coverage like a schoolyard bully. The latest offender reveals that the White House has skewed figures to positively reflect the number of jobs saved or produced by the highly touted $787 billion stimulus.

The Obama Administration heavily distorts the number of recovery-funded jobs by claiming more than 30,000 in a desperate effort to prove it’s on track to meet its goal of creating 3.5 million new ones by the end of next year. The figure overstates the actual number by at least 5,000, according to the report, which reveals that some government counts were more than 10 times as high as the real figures.  

In some cases, the administration credited the stimulus for creating bogus jobs that still don’t exist. The story includes examples taken from a series of contracts and documents analyzed by reporters. They include; a company working with a federal agency credited with creating 4,231 jobs when only about 1,000 were produced, a Georgia college credited with nearly 300 jobs when none was actually developed and a Florida child care center that saved 129 jobs but not with stimulus money.

In the original story, the Obama advisor who oversees the stimulus program blamed the companies for the errors and claimed the mistakes would be corrected. The same official subsequently issued a statement after the piece was published, accusing the Associated Press of drawing “misleading conclusions” by using only a “small portion” of data. 

Pervasive corruption in Obama’s monstrous stimulus program has been repeatedly exposed in various media and congressional reports over the last few months. Millions have been lost to waste, fraud and abuse as well as highly questionable projects that are unlikely to fulfill any of the plan’s goals. In fact, a scathing U.S. Senate report (A Second Opinion on the Stimulus) documents tens of millions of dollars in wasteful stimulus projects and predicts that at least $55 billion will be lost to fraud and abuse by the time all the money is spent.