Florida’s Republican governor violated the sate Constitution when he refused to fill an appeals court vacancy because all the candidates recommended by the Judicial Nominating Commission were white.

The state’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled this week that Governor Charlie Crist must appoint one of the commission’s six nominees to fill an opening in central Florida, which he has refused to do because none of the candidates are minorities. 

The vacancy in the Daytona Beach-based Fifth District Court of Appeal was created by the December retirement of Judge Robert Pleus. Florida’s Constitution says the governor has 60 days after receiving the nominating panel’s list to fill a court vacancy.

But when the governor got the Judicial Nominating Commission’s (JNC) roster of four white men and two women he asked the panel to reconsider and add minorities. The commission is made up of a group of lawyers, most appointed by Crist, who reviewed dozens of candidates including at least three black lawyers. 

The commission rejected the governor’s request to add new candidates and a standoff ensued with Crist refusing to make the appointment. In March, the retiring judge asked the Supreme Court to order Crist to name his replacement from the existing list. 

In its 11-page ruling the Supreme Court says that the governor lacks the authority under the Constitution to seek a new list of nominees from the JNC and has a mandatory duty to fill the vacancy. It goes on to "applaud the governor's interest in achieving diversity in the judiciary" but says the Constitution does not grant him the discretion to refuse or postpone making an appointment.

Crist, a former Florida Attorney General who is running for U.S. Senator in 2010, says he remains committed to ensuring that the diversity of the people of Florida is represented in the judiciary. 

While members of Congress criticize executives of bailed out companies for taking too many costly trips to resorts, their taxpayer-funded travel—often to exotic spots unrelated to their official duties—has increased drastically. 

U.S. taxpayers dished out $13 million for hundreds of federal lawmakers and their families to travel overseas in 2008 alone and the tab will only get bigger. A newspaper’s thorough analysis of 60,000 congressional travel records reveals that spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995 and has nearly tripled since 2001. 

Since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago, the cost of overseas travel for legislators and their families has jumped 50%. A few have traveled to war zones (undoubtedly for favorable sound bites) but mainly they have gone to locations unrelated to their work, such as the Galapagos Islands, Paris, Italy, New Zealand and Japan.  

Just last summer, Washington Democrat Brian Baird took a four-day trip to the Galapagos—a group of volcanic islands off the South American coast—with his wife, four other lawmakers and their family members. They spent $22,000 on meals and hotels, according to the newspaper report. A member of the House Science Committee, Baird said the trip was essential to learn about global warming.

Earlier this year House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (of Air Pelosi fame) made an eight-day pit stop in Italy, along with eight other lawmakers and their entourage of spouses, en route to Afghanistan to supposedly check up on U.S. troops. The group spent nearly $60,000 on hotel and meals in Italy though it’s unclear what exactly their official mission was there. 

On a separate European jaunt, Alabama Republican Bud Cramer racked up a $5,700 tab for two weeks even though he wasn’t running for reelection and his term expired just two months later. Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, took a group to Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Panama to solidify the message that “homeland security does not begin or end at our borders.”

Members of Congress have for decades been given carte blanche to travel wherever they want with their family and stick taxpayers with the hefty tab. Nearly two dozen full-time government employees organize the trips and the Air Force maintains a fleet of 16 passenger planes for many of the trips. In many ways the federal lawmakers are like the executives of the government bailed out companies they love to criticize. 

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee—Michigan Democrat John Conyers—abruptly reversed his opposition to a controversial hazardous waste project with financial ties to his corrupt city councilwoman wife. 

A Washington D.C. newspaper reports that the veteran congressman, who chairs the House committee that oversees the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI, was vehemently opposed—along with fellow Michigan Congressman John Dingell—to the project in his district but later changed course to actually become one of its strongest advocates. 

With the help of his crooked politician wife, Conyers even wrote the federal government a letter supporting the plan and pushing for the permit transfers required for the hazardous waste injection well in the city of Romulus, Michigan. The letter, addressed to the Environmental Protection Agency, explained that “many things had changed” in favor of the project since he stood in opposition to it.

Could some of those “things” have to do with his wife’s financial ties to the contractor? Earlier this week Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers pleaded guilty to bribery involving a different scandal, but her corrupt ways go deeper than that. The councilwoman was paid thousands of dollars to switch her vote on a multi million-dollar contract—she initially opposed—to haul and treat Detroit’s sewage sludge.

The cash was delivered in fast-food parking lots and the developer who bribed Monica Conyers recently pleaded guilty to paying her more than $6,000, using a courier on four separate occasions to deliver the money. The councilwoman subsequently resigned and faces up to five years in prison. 

Monica Conyers’ aide, also under federal investigation, says his boss was tight and had financial ties with the contractor (Detroit businessman Dimitrios Papas) hired to perform the hazardous waste work that her husband initially opposed but later supported. Could it all be a coincidence? 

John Conyers hasn’t been charged with a federal crime like his beloved wife, but a few years ago he was involved in a scandal of his own when he illegally forced congressional staffers to be personal servants and work on several state and local campaigns. 

After a three-year “investigation” the House Ethics Committee took no action against Conyers, declaring that the lawmaker “accepted responsibility” for a series of House rules violations involving the abuse of his staffers. The ethics committee’s top Republican and Democratic members justified the panel’s inaction by declaring that Conyers acknowledged a “lack of clarity” in communicating what was expected of his official staff.

A professor emeritus at a public university in Tennessee has been sentenced to four years in federal prison for passing sensitive U.S. military secrets to the communist government of China and for defrauding the taxpayer-funded school of honest services.

The electrical and computer engineering professor (John Reece Roth) was indicted by a federal grand jury in mid 2008 and was subsequently convicted after a seven-day trial a few months later. A federal jury found the professor guilty of violating the Arms Export Control Act by disclosing restricted military data about unmanned aerial vehicles, known as drones, to foreign nationals.

Roth used Chinese graduate research assistants and wire transmissions to pass technical information to China between 2004 and 2006 involving a U.S. military contract with a university research spin off company he helped found. The data was specifically related to an Air Force project to develop plasma actuators for munitions-type drones. 

The disgraced professor also took a trip to China in May 2006 to supposedly give an academic lecture. Instead, federal authorities say he delivered more delicate technical data—clearly controlled by International Trafficking in Arms Regulations—about the military project. 

Roth could have caused “harm to the security of the United States,” according to the Knoxville federal judge who sentenced him to jail this week. Regardless, the judge still granted the 71-year-old professor freedom pending an appeal. 

A failing Hawaiian bank that didn’t qualify for a federal bailout still got a $135 million government infusion thanks to the intervention of an eight-term United States Senator who has the bulk of his personal wealth invested in the folding institution he also founded. 

The bank (Central Pacific Financial) did not meet the criteria for a Treasury Department bailout designed to help healthier financial institutions because its losses were depleting its capital reserves and it was already in the hands of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). 

But a powerful veteran Democratic lawmaker, who happens to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee, has a huge financial stake in the bank and he used his influence to assure it didn’t go under. Senator Daniel Inouye, who brags about being the senate’s third most-senior member and a World War II combat veteran, pressured federal regulators into bailing out his precious bank.  

The story was first reported by an investigative journalism group and subsequently published by a major U.S. newspaper. It reveals the lawmaker’s ownership of shares in the bank worth up to $700,000, which represents at least two-thirds of his total assets.  

Other lawmakers have helped banks in their jurisdictions get federal aid under the government’s massive bailout measure (Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP) but none intervened on behalf of a financial institution in which he or she owned shares. Not only does Senator Inouye have a huge financial stake in Central Pacific Bank, he founded it, along with a group of World War II veterans, in 1954. 

Under fire, Wisconsin legislators killed a measure to give illegal immigrants special driver’s license but still passed a law that gives them discounted tuition at the state’s public colleges and universities. 

The two controversial measures were inserted into the 2009-2011 state budget and, up until a few days ago, both were scheduled to be approved. After all, the Badger State has at least three official illegal alien sanctuaries—Madison, Racine and Dane County—and a history of protecting and accommodating residents who are not in the U.S. legally. 

For decades illegal immigrants have been able to obtain driver’s licenses in Wisconsin but in 2005 lawmakers rescinded the privilege in response to a federal law (Real ID Act) requiring states to verify the authenticity of every driver’s license applicant by 2011. Legislators came close to offering illegal immigrants, who won’t meet the new federal security standards, special cards but made a last-minute decision not to when the issue came under public scrutiny. 

But they still passed the college tuition measure, which will allow illegal immigrants to pay the same discounted fee ($7,576 annual in-state tuition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee compared to $17,306 out of state) as legal state residents at public colleges and universities. Incidentally, the perk is denied to legal U.S. residents of other states yet granted to those in the country illegally. 

Wisconsin becomes the nation’s 11th to offer the coveted benefit, along with the likes of California, Texas, New York and Maryland. An estimated 400 to 650 illegal immigrants annually graduate from Wisconsin high schools and will benefit from the huge discount. 

A multi million-dollar bridge financed and constructed by the United States to link two of Central Asia’s poorest countries is mainly used by drug traffickers to transport large loads on trucks.

Designed by the Army Corps of Engineers, the concrete bridge was touted by the U.S. government as a critical transit route for trade and commerce between Afghanistan and the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. Instead it has literally paved the way for drug traffickers to take big cargos of Afghan heroin and opium to Central Asia and beyond to Russia and Western Europe. 

An investigative piece published by a newspaper chain this week reveals the outrageous details of the little-known concrete bridge across the Panj River that cost U.S. taxpayers $37 million. Citing United Nations estimates, the story says that last year an average of 1,320 pounds of heroin moved daily on the northern route. That translates to nearly 6 million doses of pure heroin carried across the northern Afghan border each day. 

Before the U.S. built the bridge smugglers struggled greatly to transport drugs by throwing sacks of heroin over the Panj River, wading across when the water level was low and creating pseudo flotillas of car tires, small ferries and footbridges. Thanks to Uncle Sam that primitive method is seldom utilized. 

Now trucks just haul the drugs across the two-lane concrete bridge. Smugglers are plenty grateful to Americans who have made their job easier. They assure that high-ranking border officials are corrupt and well aware that large quantities of drugs are being transported across the bridge daily. Others say the border guards are regularly bribed to allow the cargo through. 

The U.S. has given tens of millions of dollars to the corrupt Tajik government over the years to supposedly combat drug trafficking and enhance law enforcement efforts although corruption continues to be widespread. Just this month, the U.S. helped break ground on a $2.5 million project to overhaul the country’s border guard training academy on Dushanbe. 

Incredibly, no conditions are enforced upon the notoriously corrupt Tajik government on how U.S. tax dollars are spent. Corruption is so rampant that police are regularly seen on the street taking bribes, according to a knowledgeable Western diplomat who says no one bothers demanding a reduction in drugs in exchange for the border security money.

A third law enforcement officer in one of the nation’s biggest sanctuary cities has been shot by an illegal immigrant who was protected by a don’t-ask-don’t-tell immigration policy during previous police encounters.

The Houston Police Department’s longtime rule prohibiting officers from questioning suspects about immigration status has cost the department dearly in the last few years. Two officers have been murdered and one shot in the face by illegal immigrants with previous records. 

The latest shooting occurred just last week when an illegal alien from Mexico killed an undercover police officer during a sting operation. The illegal immigrant (Roberto Pedroza Carrillo) had been deported about a decade ago and ticketed by Houston police at least four times since 2002, most recently in November, according to a news report.

Last month another Houston officer was shot in the face by an illegal immigrant drug lord while attempting to serve a narcotics warrant at a house. The illegal alien from El Salvador had been arrested five times for possession or delivery of drugs, including three times after an immigration judge granted him voluntary departure in 2001. 

In 2007 Houston officer Rodney Johnson was murdered during a routine traffic stop by a Mexican illegal that had been deported in 2004 for molesting a child and subsequently arrested for driving intoxicated, driving with a suspended license and failing to stop and provide information after an automobile accident. The illegal alien, Juan Quintero, shot Officer Johnson four times in the back of the head with a 9 millimeter handgun hidden in the waistband of his pants.  

Even before this month’s murder, the Houston Police Officer’s Union called on city leaders to reverse the department’s 17-year-old don’t-ask-don’t-tell immigration measure because it had led to the brutal shootings of two officers. Both the mayor and the police chief refuse to change the sanctuary policy because they consider it crucial to policing city neighborhoods.

Texas has several major sanctuary cities—including Austin, El Paso, Fort Worth, Dallas and San Antonio—that forbid law enforcement agencies from asking suspects about their immigration status. Houston, the state’s largest city, is estimated to have nearly half a million illegal immigrants who will remain protected under the law.

Many police departments nationwide also have similar measures and Judicial Watch has sued several—including Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and the District of Columbia—for not complying with federal immigration law. In many instances, these police departments have released violent illegal immigrants that have gone on to commit atrocious crimes.