[NY Times] WASHINGTON — The Justice Department moved on Wednesday morning to drop all charges against former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who narrowly lost his seat last year shortly after being convicted on seven felony counts of ethics violations.

In a stunning development, Justice Department lawyers told a federal court that they had discovered a new instance of prosecutorial misconduct in the case and asked that the convictions be voided. Attorney General Eric F. Holder Jr. said that in the interests of justice there would be no new trial in the case.

Prosecutorial misconduct in a case against a Republican? Imagine that!

I still have no use whatsoever for Ted Stevens and all Republicans like him — they shamelessly spend your money like Democrats. Indeed, Alaska is the second or so least populated state in the Union yet receives THE MOST per capita money in earmark spending! In fact, they receive more than twice as much pork as the second highest pork state (Hawaii, another low population state!)

Then again, at least Stevens pays his taxes unlike our treasury secretary, and now, TWO of Obama’s Health and Human Services nominees! Oh, and his first nominee for chief performance officer, whatever the heck that is. Oh, and, Trade Representative nominee Ron Kirk. Oh, also Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Sheesh.

Just so we’re all clear. We’ve got a bunch of Congressmen and administration officials who brokered these bailout deals with the financial community, were aware of and approved of retention bonuses, then once the deals came to the public light have the gall to act outraged.

If you haven’t yet read the open resignation letter by AIG executive vice president Jake DeSantis to CEO Edward Liddy, make sure you do. DeSantis is right: The people who need to be punished are long gone from AIG’s ranks. It’s people like DeSantis who were asked to salvage the company, for a salary of just $1 and a retention bonus, which our politicians knew about but now want to tax at 90%. Any outrage should be aimed at Congress, for starters.

• Now guys like our TAX CHEATING Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner want to use this government-made “crisis” to expand their power to heights not seen since the Politburo.
• Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd, was, to borrow from Michelle Malkin, “For AIG bonuses before he was against them.“
• Worse, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, “made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.” Where’s the outrage of his bonus for this monstrosity?
• Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were the first domino to fall in this credit crisis. The fox is running the henhouse. The head of the Senate Finance Committee, Barney Frank, perennially blocked all attempts to reform Fannie/Freddie.

Were these all right-wing names one can bet the conspiracy theorists would no doubt be successfully arguing that government created this crisis to expand its power.

Here’s Mark Levin:

“Now we have a guy that couldn’t remember to pay his social security taxes, couldn’t remember to pay his Medicare taxes, even though he was subsidized to pay them, told to pay them,” Levin said. “He’s smarter than everybody else in all these industries, and now we have another czar.”

The appointing of czars, he said, has been a trend according to that doesn’t comply with the powers set forth in the founding document,

“We have an administration full of czars, full of people who don’t comply with the constitution. The question today is, ‘What is your authority, Mr. Secretary, to do this?’” Levin said. “I would like to know what’s the president’s authority to do this?”

The Obama administration and its proponents say that a lack of government involvement in financial sector is what caused the current woes of the economy, specifically the banking system. Levin insisted it was just the opposite – that the banking system was never a “free market” and that’s how it got to this point.

“The problem is, we didn’t have a free market in the banking system,” he explained. “The banking system is the most regulated system next to the automobile industry. So there is no free market in the banking system. It is heavily regulated. We know about all these toxic loans thanks to Uncle Sam – pushing them as fast as they could, bundling them, encouraging the free market to respond with all kinds of packages and then they pretend it’s something wrong with the free market.”

Levin labeled advocates of the Obama agenda as “statist,” explaining that it is part of their desire to control every aspect of certain segments of the U.S. economy.

“That’s the way the statist operates and that’s what I explain here,” Levin said. “There are no limits on our government today. They’ve close to nationalize the automobile industry. Frankly, they basically nationalized the steel industry. They control the labor unions in giving them the authority that they give them. They control the products that are produced. They control what comes out of the chimney. They control what goes into the chimney. Now they want to control executive pay and they’re not going to limit it to bailed out companies.”

And the liberal community has the gall to claim that Rush Limbaugh, et. al. right-wing radio hosts, have too much say over the conservative community? Warner Huston wonders, “Since when do reporters ever come out with a more than 700 word piece to explain why they asked the president a question?”

Answer: Ever since the empowerment of the fringe Left, that’s when.

It seems CNN’s Senior White House Correspondent Ed Henry has been under siege ever since he dared ask our Lord and Savior president, Barack Obama, about his administration’s knowledge and reaction to AIG bonuses. You’ll recall the very Democrats now expressing (faux) outrage over these bonuses had full knowledge of them months prior to their full disclosure. Me thinks they doth protest too much.

Huston continues:

If you’ll recall, on Tuesday (March 24) Henry asked Obama why he waited days to react to the outrage over the AIG bonuses that Treasury Secretary Geithner wrote into the bailout plan. Avoiding the question, Obama replied with a surly “Because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.” This exchange had the extremists at DailyKos and the profane folks at Wonkette as well as the rest of the left-O-sphere worked up into a frothy lather over Henry’s low down, hornswoggling ways. How DARE he ask the Obammessiah a pointed question! Why it’s sacrilege, surely!

So CNN has dutifully whimpered no mas and tried to smooth the waters with this odd article explaining away why that darned ol’ Ed Henry had the temerity to ask The One a question. It’s an obvious effort to appease the gods of the left-O-sphere and other zealots of the Obamanation. Henry must want a talisman to warn off the lefty heebie-jeebies awfully bad to go this far.

… Since when do reporters ever come out with a more than 700 word piece to explain why they asked the president a question? Did any reporter ever feel it necessary to offer a mea culpa or an “explanation” after having asked George W. Bush a “tough” question? Or did they rather do a few victory laps with the hearty back slapping of colleagues and moonbats alike, defiant in their revelry?

Ah, but not this time. You see, this time we are talking about The One and anyone asking Speaks-with-TelePrompTer a tough question gets the whole tribe up in arms. So, Henry hastened to his word processor to slam out an apologia that is as much asking his pals on the extreme left to stop hitting him as it is trying to get them all to understand that he was just “doing his job.”

Indeed. A pretty sad state of affairs for our modern mainstream media.

Sure it’s sickening that AIG officials such as AIG CEO Charles Liddy are getting bonus money, but perhaps not for the reason you’d think.

First thing to note: these weren’t performance bonuses, but retention bonuses. That’s a whole different ball game, based on promises made long before anyone knew the terms TARP or bailout, and it has a very legal implication to it — you try to withhold it, and you’re going to lose in court, period. Comparing the Liddy bonus to performance bonuses, such as at Citi, are well off the mark.

Next, let’s not lose sight of where our true righteous anger should be aimed — CONGRESS!

Charles Krauthammer and Stephen Moore elaborate:

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer: “The morning and afternoon of the interrogation of the head of AIG was Congress at its absolute demagogic worst. I mean, let me count the ways. Here’s a guy who comes out of retirement to work for a dollar a year, who is not even in AIG at the time of the take over by the government, who’s being attacked by members of Congress earning $175,000 a year, who have just received in January a raise of $4,700. Secondly, the Democrats are the ones who passed the stimulus package, which had this provision in it.”

More Krauthammer: “Lastly, the money here involved in the scheme of things is absolutely trivial; it’s $165 million. That’s what CC Sabathia is getting to front the Yankees for his left-handed changeup. If Bill Gates, out of the goodness of his heart were to pay the bonuses for 100 years, he would still have half his fortune left. … It’s a distraction and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress are using it for political advantage, and nothing else” (“Special Report,” FNC, 3/18).

… Wall Street Journal‘s Moore: “This guy [Liddy] is being totally scapegoated here. He was not the CEO when AIG took the fall. He’s actually a patriot. This is a guy who’s come in and almost no salary … to try to turn this thing around. So he was dealt a bad hand. Now, watching those scenes from that hearing, listening to people like Barney Frank bloviate against this guy — the people who are really the villains here are the members of Congress. They’re the ones who approved this bill that did not block this compensation package” (“On the Record,” FNC, 3/18).

Exactly. It’s just another reminder why government shouldn’t have gotten involved in the private market (at least not in this manner) to begin with.

Companies like AIG, Congress told us, were “too big to fail.” That’s manure wrapped in garbage surrounded by excrement. Indeed, the most important philosophy of capitalism is that it has a cruelly impartial self-correction mechanism. Companies that don’t perform should fail, as it forces restrucuring and better leadership. Even if bankruptcy had occurred at AIG, the businesses most profitable portions would have been sold off. Sure it can be painful, but that’s the point. And, it’s also a great deal for the smart and effective companies that can gobble up the remains. Lastly, one can’t argue that the government saved the jobs of the little guys working there — with an 8+ percent unemployment rate, clearly these sectors have laid off employees, even as they’ve accepted bailout money.

Here’s Andrew Roth:

I’m glad Greg Mankiw caught this. Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner told Congress last month that China should stop manipulating their currency (by buying dollars). Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Chinese to keep buying U.S. dollars.

So which is it??

This blunder, along with the “Buy American” fiasco, the empty cabinet seats at Commerce and the USTR, and the failure to pass the pending free trade agreements with Korea, Panama, and Colombia, prove that Obama is slow to grasp the importance of global commerce, especially as it relates to our current economic crisis.

Remember folks, Geithner was the financial “genius” who was supposedly so indispensable we needed to just overlook his failure to pay income tax. Indispensable? More like indefensible. All he’s done so far is make as many gaffes as Joe “Web Site Number” Biden.

By the way, is it Geithner or Geitner, because apparently Google News has both…

Amazing story about PBS’ Bill Moyers. And, it should be added, that were it discovered that a conservative pundit engaged in such abuses, he’d be packing a cardboard box with his personal possessions and clearing the office by the end of that day.

One of the darker periods of modern American history was J. Edgar Hoover’s long reign over the FBI, as we have learned since he died in 1972. So it is more than a historical footnote to discover new records showing that prominent public television broadcaster Bill Moyers participated in Hoover’s exploits.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Washington Post has obtained a few of the former FBI director’s secret files. According to a Thursday front-page story, Hoover was “consumed” with exposing a (nonexistent) relationship between a gay photographer and Jack Valenti, the late film industry lobbyist who was then an aide to Lyndon Johnson. Hoover’s M.O. was to amass incriminating personal information as political blackmail.

But as the Post reports in passing, the dossier also reveals that Mr. Moyers — then a special assistant to LBJ — requested in 1964 that Hoover’s G-men “investigate two other administration figures who were ‘suspected as having homosexual tendencies.’”
More

This isn’t the first time Mr. Moyers’s name has come up in connection with Hoover’s abuse of office. When Laurence Silberman, now a federal appeals judge, was acting Attorney General in 1975, he was obliged to read Hoover’s secret files in their entirety in preparation for testimony before Congress — and as far as we know remains one of the only living officials to have done so. “It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service,” he wrote in these pages in 2005.

Amid “bits of dirt on figures such as Martin Luther King,” Judge Silberman found a 1964 memo from Mr. Moyers directing Hoover’s agents to investigate Barry Goldwater’s campaign staff for evidence of homosexual activity. A few weeks before, an LBJ aide named Walter Jenkins had been arrested in a men’s bathroom, and Mr. Silberman wrote that Mr. Moyers and his boss evidently wanted leverage in the event Goldwater tried to use the liaison against them. (He didn’t, as it happened.)

When that episode became public after Mr. Silberman testified, an irate Mr. Moyers called him and, with typical delicacy, accused him of falling for forged CIA memos. Mr. Silberman offered to study the matter and, should Mr. Moyers’s allegations pan out, he would publicly exonerate him. “There was a pause on the line and then he said, ‘I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?’ And then he rang off.”
The Opinion Journal Widget

Memories are short in Washington, and Mr. Moyers has gone on to promote himself as a political moralist, routinely sermonizing about what he claims are abuses of power by his ideological enemies. Since 9/11, he has been particularly intense in criticizing President Bush for his antiterror policies, such as warrantless wiretapping against al Qaeda.

Yet the historical record suggests that when Mr. Moyers was in a position of actual power, he was complicit in FBI dirt-digging against U.S. citizens solely for political purposes. As Judge Silberman put it in 2005, “I have always thought that the most heinous act in which a democratic government can engage is to use its law enforcement machinery for political ends.”

Mr. Moyers told us through a spokeswoman that he “never heard of the Valenti matter until this story and had nothing to add to it.” He also pointed to a 1975 Newsweek article in which he wrote that he learned of the LBJ-Hoover relationship in “the quickly fading days of my innocence.” In the Nixon days, this was called a nondenial denial.

Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) — During a decade in Congress, California Representative Grace Napolitano has pocketed more than $200,000 of political contributions by charging as much as 18 percent interest on money she loaned to her own campaign.

The suburban Los Angeles Democrat made the $150,000 loan in 1998, when she was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Through Dec. 31, her campaign committee has used donations to pay Napolitano $221,780 of interest while reducing the principal by just $64,727, a review of her Federal Election Commission filings shows.

As recently as June 2008, Napolitano held a fundraiser asking supporters and political action committees for money to pay down the 1998 debt. Napolitano, her spokesman and her campaign’s lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Leahy Proposes Panel To Investigate Bush Era
U.S. Attorney Firings Among Issues
By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 10, 2009; A04

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday called for a “truth commission” to investigate controversial actions of the Bush administration, including the politically inspired firings of U.S. attorneys, the treatment and torture of terrorism suspects and the authorization of warrantless wiretapping.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said his proposal is meant to launch a fact-finding inquiry into key decisions of George W. Bush’s presidency, including intelligence matters before and during the Iraq war and scandals at the Department of Justice. He said such a commission would not seek to prosecute former administration officials but would have the power to subpoena them to testify.

“Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened,” Leahy said as he outlined his proposal during a speech at Georgetown University. “Sometimes the best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again.”

Leahy likened the proposed commission to the “truth and reconciliation” panels that investigated the apartheid regime in South Africa and the 1979 Ku Klux Klan massacre in Greensboro, N.C. He said the commission could be made up of “a group of people universally recognized as fair minded and without axes to grind.”

George W. Bush = Apartheid.

Dick Cheney = KKK.

Yeah, no axes to grind there…

While we’re on the topic, perhaps Sen. Leahy can investigate himself and fellow House and Senate Democrats, because many of them as members of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees were informed of and, one assumes by their years of silence on the matter, agreed to the government’s decision to both warrantless wiretapping (what is oft erroneously termed domestic wiretapping) and harsh interrogation methods. Also, the senator should investigate himself for years of leaking classified intelligence to the media (he was even stripped of intelligence duties in the 1980s before his rebirth as head witch-hunter).

Next, Leahy’s committee could investigate Leon Panetta, President Obama’s pick for the director of CIA. Panetta, it seems, agreed to outlaw torture except when the government decides it “absolutely necessary to find out what information that individual has,” which is a nice way of saying that his CIA actually won’t outlaw torture. (The WSJ rightly termed this the “Jack Bauer exception.”)

Perhaps Leahy could investigate former President Bill Clinton, who instituted rendition as a U.S. policy? And while he’s investigating Clinton for rendition, he could also investigate Clinton for firing every U.S. attorney (whereas Bush only fired some).

Finally, Sen. Leahy needs to investigate Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama himself, because according to The Washington Post, Obama and Holder “invoked the same ‘state secrets’ privilege as its predecessor [Bush] in federal court in San Francisco yesterday in opposing the reinstatement of a lawsuit that alleges that a Boeing Co. unit flew people to countries where they were tortured as part of the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition.’”

This puts Obama’s CIA in the same place as Bush’s CIA. It would seem that it’s far easier to criticize intelligence gathering as a candidate than it is as a president, whom the public holds accountable for their safety. This, in part, explains why Obama wants little to do with Leahy’s ridiculous fishing expedition.

Actions speak louder than words, and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) is absolutely right to note that there’s a double standard in play where any Republican nominee who skipped paying or made hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax “oversights” would have been immediately ripped apart by the press and disqualified by Democrats in Congress.

Nonetheless, one week after the confirmation of Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner it’s discovered that Department of Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle failed to pay about $128,000 in taxes for a span of more than three years. Only now, once nominated for President Obama’s cabinet, does he make amends to pay.

As I remarked of Geithner’s anemic self-defense, if our tax code is so complex that neither the Treasury Secretary nor a 25-year member of Congress could figure it out, how is it that Joe Citizen is expected to?

It’s pretty pathetic, and quite telling too that so many Congressional “leaders” have no issue with these transgressions. The message to the American public is to do as they say (pay your taxes) and not as they do (don’t pay their taxes).

What’s particularly galling in the case of Daschle is that he, as a member of Congress, often vilified those who act as he now does.  Hypocrisy thy name is Tom Daschle.

Well, on taxes, you may recall that Mr. Daschle’s Senate Democrats led the campaign against “Benedict Arnold corporations” that earn too much income overseas. The companies do this legally, in part to avoid a U.S. corporate tax rate (35%) that is the developed world’s second highest, but that hasn’t stopped the Daschle Democrats from comparing them to traitors.

Then there was the assault on legal tax shelters, led in the Daschle Senate by Democrat Carl Levin. The Levin hearings encouraged the Justice Department to prosecute employees who sold tax shelters for KPMG, though no tax court had found them illegal. Most of the KPMG charges were later thrown out of court, but not before careers were ruined and life savings spent on legal defense fees. Under political pressure in 2002, the IRS disclosed the names of users of a KPMG shelter, including William Simon Jr., a Republican candidate for California Governor. Democrats cried that Mr. Simon was a tax cheat, and he had to release years of tax returns to show otherwise.

Now we learn that Mr. Daschle failed to report some $255,000 in income from 2005 through 2007 for a car and driver supplied to him for personal use. The chauffeur service was provided by Leo Hindery, a big Democratic donor who also made Mr. Daschle a bundle by making him a limited partner in InterMedia Partners, a private equity shop.

As a legal tax matter, this isn’t even a close call. Mr. Daschle says he used the car service about 80% for personal use, and 20% for business. But his spokeswoman says it only dawned on the Senator last June that this might be taxable income. Mr. Daschle’s excuse? According to a Journal report Friday, “he told committee staff he had grown used to having a car and driver as majority leader and did not think to report the perk on his taxes, according to staff members.” How’s that for a Leona Helmsley moment: Doesn’t everyone have a car and chauffeur, dear?

The Senate Finance Committee is also reviewing whether certain “travel and entertainment services” provided to Mr. Daschle and his wife Linda, an aviation lobbyist, should also be reported as income. The Washington Post reports that Mr. Daschle has earned more than $5 million over the past two years, including $220,000 from the health-care industry he’s been nominated to regulate. Capitalism is wonderful, but at the very least Mr. Daschle’s record strips the veneer from President Obama’s moralizing that lobbying and special interest pleading are the root of all evil in Washington. In appointing Mr. Daschle, Mr. Obama is showing that lobbying is fine as long as it is done by people who agree with him.

Some Democrats said on the weekend that Mr. Daschle deserves to be confirmed because they “know” he is “honest.” But that isn’t the standard Mr. Daschle set for GOP appointees who had no ethical taint. In 2001, he established a new, 60-vote confirmation standard for Eugene Scalia to be Labor Department Solicitor, though Mr. Scalia had been approved in committee and would have won on the Senate floor. He also filibustered Miguel Estrada, a judicial nominee of wide renown, on the trivial grounds that the Bush Administration wouldn’t release internal memos when Mr. Estrada had worked as a Justice Department staff lawyer.

Here are some thoughts on the proposed and likely confirmation for Secretary of Treasury nominee Tim Geithner.

1) If a proposed secretary of the treasury cannot figure out our tax code, how is it that the rest of us should be expected to?

2) Conversely, if it’s not a tax complexity problem, how is it that Geithner, whom we’re told over and over is just brilliant, could screw up his tax returns?

3) Geithner didn’t make “goofs” on his tax returns. Nor did he make “mistakes,” “oversights,” or any other myriad of downplaying terminology. He didn’t pay his taxes for several years. Period.

4) Worse. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) refunds its employees (who are taxed as self-employed) for their taxes. This means that Geithner double dipped — he accepted the IMF stipend to pay the taxes, but didn’t ever pay the taxes! That’s not a mistake. It’s criminal.

5) [Wall Street Journal, Geithner Apologizes Over Taxes, Jan. 21, 2009] “After the Internal Revenue Service audited him in 2006 and discovered the payroll-tax errors, Mr. Geithner corrected them for 2003 and 2004. Only after Mr. Obama picked him last fall to be Treasury secretary did Mr. Geithner pay the Social Security and Medicare tax he owed for 2001 and 2002.” Again, this is Obama’s proposed treasury secretary. This is “Change”? No, it’s more “do as we say, not as we do” from the federal government.

6) The media gave Joe the Plumber a million times more grief for his tax woes. Similarly, could you ever imagine the press giving a tax-cheating Republican nominee such a pass?

7) If you or I made such mistakes, and owed the government $42,000 in back taxes, would we be treated with such kid gloves? Yet tens of thousands of self employed go through this maddening tax code every year with no sympathy from their government.

8 ) The defense that Geithner is not that liberal, and that Republicans could do worse in an Obama treasury secretary, as echoed by some Republicans, may be the case but shouldn’t trump principles. That Republicans seem to have no issue with this simple concept explains why they keep losing elections.

9) The defense, recently repeated by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, that Geithner is the ONLY person who can get us out of our financial woes is ridiculous and insulting to our intelligence. By the way, Geithner has been one of Bush’s chief economic advisors and bailout advocates for the past year. If the bailout didn’t work over the last year, why will it work under Obama? (Also, see #2 above. So much for the financial genius.)