In CHRIS CHRISTIE ISN'T THE ONLY GOP GOVERNOR WITH ETHICS TROUBLES, David Mark, of Politix, fills us in on ethics problems with Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is retiring while a U.S. attorney investigates him for allegedly cutting off $7.5 million of funding to the Travis County District Attorney's office to force a judge he did not like to resign, and Iowa Governor Terry Barnstad, who faces a much tougher reelection campaign after allegations that the state was firing employees for political reasons and then paying them off to keep quite about it.
In Austin, Special Prosecutor Michael McCrum is spearheading a criminal probe of Texas Gov. Perry. That after the governor vetoed $7.5 million in funding for the Travis County District Attorney's office, in an effort to force DA Rosemary Lehmberg to resign her position.
Lehmberg, who is a Democrat, was charged of DWI in August 2013. She was subsequently convicted and sentenced to serve jail time. While in jail, she wrote a letter of apology to the people she serves and refused to resign. In December, a judge ruled that she could remain as the DA of Travis County.
Critics allege Governor Perry used his line item veto to take $7.5 million out of the Travis County DA office until Judge Lehmberg resigned so that Perry could appoint her replacement before his term ends.
Perry claims she just can't do her job.
In Iowa Governor Terry Barnstad faces accusations in recent weeks that Iowa was firing state "employees for political reasons and then paying them to agree to confidentiality agreements."
After long denying any irregularities, Branstad fired the senior state official responsible for these hush money payments. ...
This comes on top of a trickle of other scandals, including a secret list of former state employees who could not be rehired as well as firing a state police official who called in the governor's SUV for going "a hard 90" miles an hour on the highway (after pursuit, the car was eventually clocked going 84 miles an hour, 19 above the speed limit on the highway)
Barnstad is the longest serving Governor in the U.S. and his Democratic opponent state Senator Jack Hatch faces an uphill battle. Some think Hatch may now have a chance in what otherwise would have been a "slam-dunk" for the GOP. I have not seen any polls to know what our realistic chances are.
Shouldn't we educate ourselves on other potentially corrupt Governors, of either party so we can make a well educated call for higher ethical standards from our political leaders. What a strange coincidence that all the examples I have found so far have been Republican.
One disappointment in this rather "thin" article is it contain no mention of Governor's Scott Walker, McCrory (I believe in North Carolina,) both of whom I remember hearing were involved in potentially "dodgy" dealings, or former Governor McDonnell and his wife who have recently been indicted for not reporting large gifts.
We've had several reports here about curious allegations with regard to Scott Walker which I will look up, or perhaps, someone can fill me in here.
And what about Florida Governor Rick Scott? Hasn't he been accused of some sketchy deals or have his problem been just a lack of intelligence, and compassion for Florida residents for who can not get the Medicare expansion paid for by the Federal Government under our Affordable Care Act, due to Governor Scott's intransigence. People were also upset by his cancellation of the rail line extension. These may not qualify as an ethical issues, but rather may be just a lack of intelligence or compassion, which would be a different list in a different post.
Perhaps, our readers from these different states can fill in on the details so we can compile a better list than this. Wouldn't it be useful to have a list of all the potential "yet-to-be indicted" Governors? Others maybe having trouble keeping track of it all, as well?
4:19 PM PT: Hey, this is great, readers are writing an even better post for me with many excellent links I'll be posting here in the next few minutes..
Here's the closer I wished I had writing by MarkthShark.
Hmm, I wonder if the good people... (7+ / 0-)
in Texas, Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maine, North and South Carolina, etc., and of course, my state of Florida, actually learned something about the rank dishonesty, hypocrisy, and just plain meanness that's inherent in the Republican party.
I wonder if they've learned that the GOP cannot be trusted with power?
(if they've learned anything at all, there will be a wave 'a comin' in November)
Time will tell
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." - 17th-century French clergyman and statesman Cardinal Richelieu.
by markthshark on Sun Apr 20, 2014 at 03:19:03 PM PDT
4:42 PM PT: Wow, a2nite has found a gold mine of juicy revelations about John Kasich who appears to aspire to the same kind of cheesiness as Governor Christie. This article is so rich in details about this front organization called JobsOhio that is acting as a public relations firm for Kasich using tax payer money. Here's a taste. And a2nite has another link as does Lake Superior and Bearsguy. I can't keep up with you all.
Please check out the comments.
RobsOhio caught cooking both its job numbers and accounting books
It was founded by a California maxed out donor (Mark Kvamme) to Kasich gubernatorial campaign, who had also been a major donor to Kasich’s post-Congress PAC that kept his political aides on the payroll while Kasich wandered the political wilderness on Fox News between his congressional career and gubernatorial bid. A guy who then maxed donations to the state legislator who pushed the first bill creating JobsOhio through the legislature.
Speaker Bill Batchelder went from openly questioning whether that JobsOhio legislation was constitutional to railroading an amendment to shield JobsOhio from the public scrutiny… after receiving $10,000 in political donations from Kvamme (Kvamme has given $49,000 to the Ohio House GOP Caucus’ campaign fund over the past two years). After Kvamme abruptly left it, JobsOhio was handed over to John Minor, who also just happens to be a former out-of-state major political donor to Governor Kasich.
And its spending millions of dollars on advertisements that don’t target out-of-state businesses looking to create jobs in Ohio, but in trying to persuade taxpayers, with their own money, that Ohio turned the economic corner under Governor Kasich, and not under Governor Strickland. JobsOhio is only a failure if you believed it was intended to be an earnest economic development agency. As a political racket, it’s been an outrageous and unquestionable smashing success.
But who could of predicted that JobsOhio would turn into a politicized organization that was more about press releases than job creation? One that, without public accountability, would engage in questionable ethics to inflate its success? One that without a system of public accountability and transparency would waste millions of state tax dollars on self-promotion and wasteful spending over actual job creation?
4:49 PM PT: JobsOhio: We’re not getting the jobs done
According to Kasich, if Ohioans were willing to sacrifice the transparency and accountability that came with a public agency like the Ohio Department of Development, he’d have a nimble corporate entity that would go out and lure major job creation projects to Ohio from out-of-state, like “Rhodes Raiders” that brought Honda to Ohio originally. Let JobsOhio be exempt from Ohio’s ethics and state government employment protection laws, and it would be internally accountable to more easily fire people who underperformed, Kasich argued.
In response to last year’s third quarter report, we pointed out that on that standard, JobsOhio was barely better than nothing at all: ...
Since then, there was the 2012 annual report that buried the disastrous Q4 results of JobsOhio (in which JobsOhio had to admit that the number of projects it approved had nosedived). In both that report, and in every report JobsOhio has released, it shows that on average more than 75% of the job pledges it claims its projects generate from businesses in return for JobsOhio assistance are pledges to merely retain jobs.
But, conveniently, JobsOhio does not provide any evidence that these jobs would not have been retained without JobsOhio’s assistance. In other words, most (over three-quarters) of the activity of JobsOhio is not geared at creating jobs or attracting jobs from out of Ohio, but merely providing subsidies to private sector companies for jobs in Ohio they had already created without assistance and with no evidence that they would not continue to exist without JobsOhio.
Bearsguy,brings up this link, which while not an ethics violation, appears to be a indictment of an incompetently run regional development effort. Citizen Action of Wisconsin writes
WEDC Job Numbers Shows Massive County Disparity in Economic Development
MADISON - New April data from Governor Walker’s Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) shows continuing regional disparities and a complete lack of effort to promote employment opportunities in areas of the state with the most economic need. This data follows previous Citizen Action of Wisconsin research showing large geographic and political disparities in the impact self-reported by WEDC. Our analysis shows that WEDC is ignoring numerous counties and focusing disproportionately on low-unemployment Waukesha County.
“These new numbers reported by Walker’s economic development agency reveal a complete absence of serious planning,” said Kevin Kane, Lead Organizer of Citizen Action of Wisconsin and report author. “It is the state’s responsibility to use state funds where they will have the most impact, not ignore high unemployment areas of the state.”
”WEDC’s own numbers reveal that it is not fairly distributing scarce economic resources to every area of Wisconsin,” said Robert Kraig, Executive Director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin. “Since it was created early 2011, Governor Walker’s jobs agency has been an economic train wreck. The best way to restore real public accountability and basic fairness to Wisconsin’s economic development programs is to disband WEDC.”
5:08 PM PT: Lake Superior brings us this.about Rick Snyder.