President Obama was humiliated on the world stage when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) rejected his personal, last-minute pitch to host the 2016 Olympics in his adopted hometown of Chicago.

International and domestic media are having a blast digging into the overly confident commander-in-chief, who thought he could whiz into Copenhagen and secure the games—and lucrative contracts that come with such an event—for his buddies back home. 

But the IOC flatly rejected what one major U.S. media outlet calls “Obama’s politically risky Olympics gamble,” just hours after Air Force One landed in the Danish capital, granting the bid to Brazil. Chicago was actually eliminated in the first round of voting, before the host country was even selected. It ended four years and millions of dollars in planning for the Windy City and local leaders who were banking on the president’s star power to seal the deal.  

Obama was certain that his immense popularity would sway the committee to pick his city over the likes of Madrid, Tokyo and the ultimate winner, Rio de Janeiro. The equally popular First Lady sat by the president’s side as he confidently made his case with an ardent speech. “I urge you to choose Chicago," Obama told the IOC. “And if you do, if we walk this path together, then I promise you this: The city of Chicago and the United States of America will make the world proud.” 

Chicago’s dismal showing after Obama’s impassioned eleventh-hour effort is a stunning humiliation for the president, according to an international news report that says a narrow defeat would have been acceptable. The sheer scale of the defeat was a bombshell and a major blow for Obama, however. Nevertheless, the president was greeted as usual like a rock star by the IOC delegates—then humiliated by them. 

A major U.S. television network that loves Obama reported the "stunning" and “crushing" news live from Chicago with a top news anchor calling it a "kick in the pants for the president." A local newspaper columnist writes that now the city’s giant “2016” banners are going to seem as anachronistic as Christmas decorations in July.

Under the direction of a Clinton official who orchestrated the pardon of a major-league drug trafficker, the federal agency that oversees lawful immigration is preparing to legalize millions of illegal immigrants. 

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is getting ready for the huge influx of applications that will bombard the agency when President Obama’s plan to legalize the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal aliens becomes law, according to a major newspaper report. 

The agency’s director, Alejandro Mayorkas, says his goal is to be ready to expand rapidly in order to handle the massive increase in visa applications under Obama’s comprehensive immigration reform plan. As the Homeland Security agency responsible for overseeing lawful immigration and granting visas, USCIS is equipped to handle applications from about 6 million immigrants a year. 

If Obama’s amnesty measure comes to fruition USCIS could receive that many applications in just a few weeks, according to Mayorkas, who recently distributed $1.2 million in grants to help migrants adjust in America. In order to efficiently handle the increase, Mayorkas is implementing several measures to process applications faster. Among them is a method of receiving visa forms in the mail and another that allows illegal aliens to start the legalization process through a simple mail-in registration form. 

One high-ranking Republican lawmaker points out that the agency is risking national security by neglecting its current workload, which includes thorough background checks of visa applicants, to focus on preparing for legislation that hasn’t even been introduced. While this is a valid point, consider who’s running USCIS.

A Clinton U.S. Attorney in California, Mayorkas resigned in shame after arranging the pardon of an Argentine drug dealer serving a 15-year prison sentence for operating a monstrous cocaine ring. The convicted felon, Carlos Vignali, is the son of a wealthy political donor (Horacio Vignali) who convinced influential community leaders—mostly recipients of his generous contributions—to advocate for his son’s pardon.

Mayorkas’ intervention was the most crucial and by far carried the most weight, Clinton officials later revealed. Vignali was one of 140 pardons and 36 commutations that Clinton granted during his last hours as president. Outraged federal prosecutors in Minneapolis, where Vignali was convicted for trying to sell 800 pounds of cocaine, said Mayorkas called them several times inquiring about the case. The Minneapolis federal prosecutors subsequently wrote the Justice Department strongly opposing the commutation but were ignored. 

A congressional investigation into Clinton’s last-minute pardons blasts Mayorkas for intervening on behalf of Vignali, pointing out that senior law enforcement and political officials should have been precluded from supporting a commutation for such a criminal. 

When Obama named Mayorkas to head the USCIS earlier this year, he conveniently omitted the scandals of his past and instead boasted about his credentials as a prosecutor of public corruption, organized crime and civil rights violations. No mention of getting a serious felon pardoned while serving as U.S. Attorney. 

As the Obama Administration pushes for universal government-run healthcare a congressional audit reveals exorbitant fraud and abuse in the government’s decades-old insurance program for the poor, questioning the feds’ ability to handle a bigger plan that covers millions more. 

During a two-year period alone, investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found 65,000 instances of fraud involving Medicaid’s prescription drug program in only a handful of states. The estimated cost to U.S. taxpayers is about $65 million but the best part is that state and federal officials failed miserably to prevent the outrageous scams. 

Only five states (California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina and Texas) were probed so the crisis is thought to be much more widespread than documented in the GAO’s 18-page report. After all, Medicaid, which is jointly funded by states and the federal government, spends $23 billion on drugs for low-income patients each year. 

In the probed states, about $2.3 million went to practitioners and pharmacies barred or excluded from federal health care programs, including Medicaid. Nearly 2,000 prescriptions were written for dead patients and 1,200 prescriptions were written by dead doctors. The most frequently abused prescription drugs were painkillers and mood-altering medications. 

A detailed chart offers a breakdown of the various drugs that were fraudulently prescribed in the different states and how much Medicaid paid for them. The report also offers numerous anecdotes that illustrate the rampant corruption in the taxpayer-funded program that also covers anchor babies, the offspring illegal immigrants. 

They include a man allowed by county officials in California to use the identity of a deceased person to get Medicaid benefits, a physician who prescribed expensive controlled substances to a dead woman, a Texas mother with a criminal history allowed to get various controlled stimulants in the name of her child and unqualified medical assistants writing prescriptions using dead physicians’ licenses. 

In every case, investigators determined that the abuse should have been caught by negligent local, state or federal officials who instead missed the boat and allowed taxpayers to get cheated. This certainly indicates that the government cannot efficiently operate a much larger universal plan that affects the entire country. 

Public safety is frequently risked by federal immigration authorities who deport illegal immigrants with criminal records by putting them on commercial flights unescorted.  

Many of the illegal aliens have been convicted of serious crimes in U.S. courts and some are sex offenders or pedophiles yet the feds send them home on planes full of unsuspecting passengers without a law enforcement officer. Often the unescorted deportees cause disruptions and in some cases they have escaped, according to a Houston newspaper that reported the rather astounding story this week. 

Officially, the agency that conducts the deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), refuses to comment on the matter or provide official statistics but fed up agents have furnished documents and testimony that should alarm everyone who boards a commercial flight. 

Of the tens of thousand of illegal immigrants deported on commercial airlines in the last few years, more than 75% flew unescorted. Among them was a man convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, another who molested an 11-year-old-girl and was described by his probation officer as a “pedophile” and numerous other offenders.

Additionally, two Peruvians who ICE officers say “have never been seen again” escaped from the airport in Houston instead of boarding their commercial flight to Lima and an unescorted Guatemalan man had to be restrained by civilians on a flight from Miami to Guatemala City. 

Airlines are not notified that convicted criminals are flying unescorted because “they pose no risk,” according to the official ICE explanation furnished to the newspaper. However, the union vice president for agents in Detention and Removal Operations assures that putting criminal illegal aliens on commercial flights is “an absolute risk to public safety.”

Misconduct among federal employees is so rampant at one government agency that its overwhelmed inspector general has drastically scaled back on its duty to investigate fraud and recover wasted tax dollars to focus on the internal crisis. 

Investigations, often involving employees accessing pornography from their government computers, grew six fold in the last year alone at the National Science Foundation (NSF), created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science and advance national health. With 1,700 employees and an annual budget of nearly $7 billion, the NSF funds about 20% of all federally supported research conducted by the nation’s colleges. 

Last year the agency’s inspector general revealed that NSF employees spend substantial amounts of work hours viewing pornography on government computers. In a 68-page report to Congress the agency’s watchdog said some NSF employees actually spend significant portions of their workdays watching, downloading and e-mailing pornography without ever getting caught. 

The problem has only worsened in the last year, according to a news report that says the NSF Inspector General has spent millions of dollars to investigate internal wrongdoing rather than focus on its job of rooting out grant fraud and waste. Citing records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the story lists various examples of downright criminal activity among high-ranking agency officials who cheated taxpayers without consequence. 

In one case a senior NSF executive spent at least 331 days viewing porn on his government computer and chatting online with naked women without getting caught. Investigators say the porn surfing cost taxpayers between $13,800 and $58,000. A separate employee accessed hundreds of pornographic web sites during work hours in a three-week period and another was caught with hundreds of photos, videos and slide shows containing porn. 

None of the public employees was subject to criminal prosecution, civil court action or debarment, though some got suspended for short periods of time. NSF officials assure that they have enacted more rigorous computer training and tightened controls to filter out inappropriate web sites from work computers. Then again, they said that a year ago when the inspector general published its scathing report. 

The convicted Chinese swindler that helped finance Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid and donated hefty sums to other top Democrats has been sentenced to 24 years in prison for defrauding investors out of tens of millions of dollars and violating federal campaign finance laws.

Norman Hsu, a one-time multi-millionaire who raised huge sums for the party’s most prominent politicians, actually got off easy because federal sentencing guidelines called for 30 years to life. Undoubtedly, Hsu still has friends in high places that perhaps intervened behind the scenes. 

After all, he raised nearly $1 million for Hillary Clinton and thousands more for party leaders like New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and veteran California Senator Dianne Feinstein. Clinton was so tight with Hsu that a voicemail recording of the former New York Senator praising her cherished donor was presented as evidence in his federal trial earlier this year.

In it the Secretary of State repeatedly thanks Hsu for his support and tells the one-time fugitive she’s never seen anybody who has been more loyal and more effective. A jury eventually convicted Hsu, who had already pleaded guilty to swindling investors out of tens of millions of dollars, of campaign finance violations. Among other things, Hsu made political donations in other people’s names to skirt federal limits. 

Democrats took his money even though many, especially Clinton, had been repeatedly warned that Hsu ran an illegal enterprise. In fact, Clinton crowned Hsu a “HillRaiser” because he quickly pledged to raise at least $100,000 for her presidential campaign. He ended up raising more than $800,000, which Clinton reluctantly returned under intense pressure after his arrest. 

Hsu’s sentencing marks the second scandal in days involving a top Democratic fundraiser. Last week Iranian Hassan Nemazee, who has donated huge sums to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and—not surprisingly—Clinton, was charged with defrauding several banks out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Prosecutors say Nemazee forged documents listing fake accounts with collateral worth hundreds of millions of dollars to obtain loans that he regularly used to make political contributions. 

Although President Obama has repeatedly vowed to battle the special interests that severely inflated military spending in the past, he supports a proposed defense bill that contains billions in earmarks for projects the Pentagon did not request and does not want.

The $2.6 billion in earmarks will fund highly questionable projects that will largely benefit the financial supporters of the lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, who will vote for the massive $636 billion spending bill. The president’s support practically guarantees that the earmarks will get final congressional approval, according to the newspaper that broke the story this week.

Steering the largest chunk of tax dollars to his supporters and his home state is the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense, Mississippi’s Thad Cochran, who allocated a total of $212 million worth of earmarks in the 2010 military spending bill. 

Twelve million will go to company that contributed thousands to Cochran’s campaign, nearly $11 million to a university whose professors and staff donated more than $10,000 to the senator and about $6 million to another firm that also donated heavily to Cochran and employs his former aide. The veteran legislator assures his earmarks are based on “national security interests” even though they will fund projects that weren’t requested by the Defense Department.

The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye, added 37 earmarks of his own worth $208 million. Nearly $70 million will go to entities that donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign, including a Hawaiian healthcare network ($24 million) and Boeing’s operation of the Maui Space Surveillance System ($20 million). Twenty million will go to a civic center named after the late Senator Ted Kennedy, a project that doesn’t seem to justify military spending.

Additionally, the proposed legislation includes nearly $2 billion for an extra destroyer that the Pentagon did not request and $2.5 billion for 10 cargo planes it does not want or need, all at the at the behest of legislators representing the states where those items are built. 

So much for Obama’s stern promise to fight contractors, entrenched lobbyists and special interests in military spending. Just last month he assured members of the nation’s largest organization of combat veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that “if Congress sends me a defense bill loaded with a bunch of pork I will veto it.” Instead he plans to sign it into law.  

In an unprecedented effort to reach out to illegal immigrants, the U.S. government will spend $26 million to send Spanish-language census questionnaires directly to homes for the first time in the decennial count’s history. 

In past years, participants could request special forms in several languages—including Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese—but this will mark the first time that the government sends to entire regions census questionnaires in a language other than English.  

More than 13 million bilingual (Spanish and English) forms will be distributed to neighborhoods with high concentrations of Latinos.  More than one-fourth of them will be mailed in California with the highest concentration going to Los Angeles County.  The South Florida city of Miami will also get a substantial amount of bilingual census forms in 2010 and so will Houston Texas and portions of Utah.  

The costly language outreach is part of an effort to accurately count a population that traditionally has been difficult to pin down, according to the Obama Administration. In other words, illegal aliens who have violated federal law and aren’t exactly jumping at the chance to have contact with government authorities.  

The nation’s powerful La Raza movement is undoubtedly thrilled that Uncle Sam is catering to the illegal population in the U.S., which is mostly Mexican and Central American.  Latino rights advocates point out that, sending forms in their native language will win over the trust of immigrants who are especially suspicious of the government amid heightened immigration raids and deportations.

In fact, earlier this year the U.S. Census Bureau's deputy director (Preston Jay Waite) demanded that federal agents cease immigration raids during the 2010 count so the government can get an accurate tally of people in the country illegally.  A California Senator (Democrat Barbara Boxer) also tried to block immigration enforcement during the census count by sneaking an amendment to a spending bill a few months ago.

That was viewed as a shameless effort to gain additional Congressional seats since counting illegal immigrants will undoubtedly give states—such as California, Arizona, Texas and Florida—with large undocumented populations additional seats in the House of Representatives after 2010. 

At least one federal lawmaker from California, Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, opposes the unprecedented mailings of bilingual forms, pointing out that taxpayers should not have to carry the additional expense of providing the special questionnaires.