Like Slimey Cockroaches & their crooked President, Liberals Spread Disease

[Warph]

Harry Reid Accuses Romney of Federal Crime on Senate Floor, Offers Zero Evidence
By Guy Benson
8/2/2012

Let's get you up to speed on this idiotic flap: As you're already aware, Mitt Romney has declined to publicly release more than two years of tax returns. He's not legally obligated to do so; nor are Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, neither of whom have chosen to live up to the levels of "transparency" they're demanding of Romney. Frustrated by the Republican presidential candidate's refusal -- and clearly unperturbed by his own hypocrisy -- Reid began circulating a totally unsubstantiated rumor this week, suggesting that Mitt Romney is a tax evader. From yesterday:

"His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son," Reid said, in reference to George Romney's standard-setting decision to turn over 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in the late 1960s. Saying he had "no problem with somebody being really, really wealthy," Reid sat up in his chair a bit before stirring the pot further. A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office. Harry, he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years," Reid recounted the person as saying. He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," said Reid. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look?

CNN Money's Dan Primack promptly took Reid to the woodshed:

One of two things has happened:(1)Reid is simply making the whole thing up, in order to pressure Romney into releasing tax returns for years prior to 2010, or (2) Reid's investor pal lied, and the Senator didn't bother to conduct even a mild vetting before sharing the accusation with reporters. Either way, shame on [the] gossipy gentleman from Nevada. Let me make this crystal clear: Investors in private equity funds do not receive, nor are they entitled to request, personal tax returns for fund managers. Not just at Bain Capital, but everywhere. For example, ask the person managing your 401(k) for their personal tax returns. See how far you get. What makes this particular claim even sillier, of course, is that Romney hasn't even been managing Bain funds for the past 10 years.



In other words, Reid is peddling pure, pungent BS. Even if this "source" at Bain (the identity of whom Reid has valiantly withheld -- on "principle," natch) exists, he would have zero knowledge of Romney's personal income taxes. Do your co-workers have access to your personal taxes? Exactly. This is ridiculous on its face. Has any of this opprobrium given Reid second thoughts? Not in the least. In fact, he dragged his baseless allegations of criminality(!) -- the Left's hot new trend, apparently -- onto the Senate floor earlier today:

He's refused to release his tax returns, as we know. If a person coming before this body wanted to be a cabinet officer, he couldn't be if he did the same refusal Mitt Romney does about tax returns. So the word's out that he hasn't paid any taxes for ten years. Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn't. We already know from one partial tax return that he gave us, he has money hidden in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and a Swiss bank account. Not making that up, that's in the partial year that he gave us. Mitt Romney makes more money in a single day than the average middle-class family makes in two years–or more.

"The word's out." What a standard! He fabricated that "word" out of thin air. By the way, someone told me Reid runs a secret dog-fighting ring in Nevada. Can't tell you who, but it sounds pretty true. Hey, have you heard the word's out about Reid's secret dog-fighting ring? What's that? Reid disputes it? Let him prove that he isn't a criminal animal abuser, because he is. (See how this works, Senator?) I'm also curious as to why Reid voted to confirm an actual tax cheat as Treasury Secretary. Reid's behavior has become so oafish and desperate that Lefty icon Jon Stewart has felt compelled to drop the hammer:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/jon-stewart-%E2%80%98you-harry-reid-are-really-really-terrible%E2%80%99/

Click through for video. You'll enjoy it, even if it means sitting through a few gratuitous shots at Fox & Friends. One choice quotation: "Who the f***are you, Harry Reid...you two-bit, trash-talking son of a..." Whoa. The Romney campaign is also eagerly joining the beat down, sensing that Democrats are beginning to damage themselves:

Click here to watch:

Have you no sense of decency, sir? Is there nothing to debase yourself and the office you hold in the name of dirty politics?"

Breitbart's John Nolte is fit to be tied over all of this. He's livid that Democrats are once again forcing Romney on defense and controlling the narrative. I don't share his view. Reid has gone so far, so clumsily that he's crossed the line and entered into counter-productivity. This reeks of mindless political desperation. Reid jumped the shark and is tripling down. It's not helping. I'll leave you with this hot scoop: A nameless, third-hand source just informed me that Harry Reid hasn't always been a joyless asshat. Care to share any countervailing evidence, Senator?

UPDATE - Reid quadruples down, telling reporters that "a number of people" (all anonymous) have told him that Romney is a tax evader. No attempt to explain how they could possibly know this information. Keep digging, chump.

UPDATE II - Mitch McConnell unloads:
"I think the Majority Leader has more important things to do than use the Senate as a forum for his baseless accusations," McConnell said Thursday in a statement... "Frankly, it's beneath the dignity of his office," the Republican senator from Kentucky said.[/font][/size]

[Warph]

Harry Reid Is a Bad Mormon
Posted by Gregory of Yardale

Every four years, Dramacrat politicians like to show up at church for a photo op. Harry Reid planned something similar, going to a Nevada Stake meeting of the LDS church to speak at a "Why I Believe" fireside. He canceled when word came down that a few protesters might show up to picket peacefully outside... activity which is now labeled violent and dangerous behavior by the Drama Queen Left. (But when people throw things and scream obscenities at Ann Coulter or Karl Rove, it's considered "Free Speech.")

Harry Reid does not uphold the values of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He supports the use of taxpayer dollars to butcher unborn babies, which is kind of a big deal to Mormons. He does not oppose redefining marriage to include same-sex couples. He supports financial irresponsibility and the reckless accumulation of debt; which is something the LDS Church strongly counsels against. His prideful arrogance is an affront to the humility followers of Jesus Christ are supposed to emulate. And most importantly, he supports the spreading of hatred and sowing divisions among people, ("contention") which is among the gravest sins within the LDS Church.

For verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another. -- 3 Nephi 11:29

Reid's attacks on president Bush, the dishonesty with which he has pushed his party's hard-left secular agenda, and his smears against opponents of the agenda tell me he sold his soul a long time ago. Reid is not a good example of what the LDS Church stands for, and his talk was obviously intended to burnish his image in the teeth of what looks to be --- despite a massive war chest funded by out-of-state donors and the Hollywood left --- a difficult campaign environment.

If Harry Reid wants to prove he really believes in Church teachings, he should prove it in his political life. He should reach out to Republicans and Tea Partiers in a Christ-like way instead of demonizing them. He should incorporate church teachings on charity, financial responsibility, and the sanctity of human life into the agenda of his party instead of fighting against them.

This would be a much more meaningful demonstration of faith than just showing up at a church to give a talk in an election year.

[Warph]

Harry Reid must go
By: John Hayward
8/3/2012 01:59 PM

Harry Reid must not remain the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate. That's an understandable objective for Republican voters in November, but it really shouldn't take until then. Reid deserves the strongest possible censure from the Senate, and it should be a bipartisan vote. For the moment, the Democrats have the majority, so someone from their party must be Majority Leader, but it shouldn't be Harry Reid.

This should be a simple enough consensus for a bipartisan majority to reach. Reid's record of obstructionism, and his failure to even produce a budget in accordance with the duties of the Senate, are certainly reasons to vote against his party in the upcoming elections. But when he took his weird effort to slander presidential candidate Mitt Romney onto the Senate floor, his incompetence reached a new level, and questions about his mental competence were invited.

For those unfamiliar with the origin of this scandal, Reid has taken to claiming that some anonymous Bain Capital investor has privately informed him that Mitt Romney hasn't paid any taxes for ten years. This would be a felony crime, exposing Romney to extensive penalties, and possibly even imprisonment.

Reid's claims are ludicrous on a number of levels. There's no reason any private investor would be privy to the confidential tax information of a partner at his investment firm. Bain doesn't prepare taxes for its partners in-house. Romney hasn't been actively involved in directing company operations since he left to manage the Salt Lake City Olympics in 1999, so Reid's imaginary "source" would be essentially claiming to have reviewed the enormously complex, confidential IRS submissions of someone who used to work for Bain Capital. And Romney has already released tax information for the last two years. He most certainly did pay taxes, and plenty of them. Are we supposed to believe he only started paying them two years ago? He ran for President in 2008. Was he dodging his taxes while he did that?

Reid's not really even pretending to believe his own story. When reporters challenged him in a conference call, he suddenly began claiming "I have had a number of people tell me that." The reporters wanted to know who those people might be. "No, that's the best you're going to get from me. I don't think the burden should be on me. The burden should be on him. He's the one I've alleged has not paid any taxes. Why didn't he release his tax returns?"

But when Reid made the remarkable and offensive decision to drag this garbage onto the floor of the Senate on Thursday, he was back to just one mysterious "source," and suddenly he was up to 12 years of Romney paying no taxes, instead of 10.

Conservatives have been having fun with Reid by turning his own ridiculous tactics against him, and claiming that "anonymous sources" have told them the Senate Majority Leader is guilty of all sorts of horrible crimes, which he must now aggressively prove himself innocent of. As funny as those jests might be, this is no laughing matter. The Senate Majority Leader is either mentally unfit to continue in office, or he's a disgusting liar who has employed his office to engage in the lowest form of political slander... all in the service of a distraction that was silly to begin with, as the Democrats somehow imagine that the public will forget about a collapsing economy and horrific unemployment because they really want to see Mitt Romney's tax returns from 2003.

The Senate has standards, and rules of ethics, designed in part to prevent a cheap political operator like Reid from hijacking the chamber for this kind of infantile theater. A lot of what transpires in both houses of Congress has primarily political motivations, of course, but there has to be some limit, based the barest notions of honor, professionalism, patriotism, and simple decency. Otherwise, what's to prevent every Senator from seizing the floor to launch baseless accusations at his political opponents, based on imaginary "sources," and turn the next session into an endless series of show trials?

Reid probably thinks he's clever for having backed Romney into a corner, since even if the Republican candidate had been considering the release of more tax information, he can hardly afford to be seen capitulating to Reid's thug tactics. But in reality, Reid's overreach has made the whole "Mitt Romney's taxes" storyline radioactive for Democrats. They're the ones who must now carefully consider whether they want to associate themselves, in even the most tangential way, with Reid's disgraceful performance.

[Warph]

                

                                   


Why not let dead people vote?

Maybe I better explain.

A recent article in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch says the Washington-based Voter Participation Center has sent voter registration applications...with names and addresses already filled in .... to dead people, pets, felons, children, nonresidents, noncitizens and others who ought not be voting.

There is suspicion among some that the group, which targets Democrat voting blocs, such as unmarried people, blacks, Latinos and young adults, is trying to pad voter rolls with ineligible voters who are likely to support Democrats.  But the center says all it is trying to do is to get legitimate, under-represented voters, who may be unregistered, to register and exercise their right to vote. It says it is using commercial mailing lists that are imperfect and produce all kinds of odd results.

According to CBS News, one woman, Brenda Charleston, received a filled-in application for a Rosie Charleston; "Rosie" was the name of her long-deceased dog.

The Washington Post reports one convicted felon received a filled-in application in the mail, signed it and became registered to vote. He was caught and tried, but some wonder how many other felons are voting illegally.

In other examples, people are receiving applications for children who are younger than 18 or live out of state, as well as long-deceased family members.

If people sign and return such applications, the only way a dead person or pet won't become an eligible voter is if a state's voting officials, who are doing crossword puzzles at Dunkin' Donuts as you read this, let them slip through.

But while Republicans cry "Voter fraud!" and Democrats fume over Republican-backed voter ID laws that they contend are disenfranchising folks who don't have ID handy when they vote, I ask this: Why not let the dead vote?

Look, the vast majority of Americans are on the public dole now, happily selling their votes to the politician who promises them the biggest goodies and I'm not talking just about those at the bottom end of the economic scale.

Food stamp programs, some $70 billion a year, have ballooned under President Barack Insane Obuma.

But the real spending is with entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and now ObumaCare.  People are taking out four and five times more from the programs than they ever paid in.

These programs need to be reformed, but any politician who tries to do so faces widespread rebellion among voters who won't hear of it.

Way too many people are on the dole these days... farmers who get subsidies not to grow, "green" businesses that get grants because of their political connections, global corporations that lobby for special tax breaks.

     So why not dead people?  Don't they deserve a piece of the government pie?

                 

What about American children who are too young to vote?  They will be paying for our current government handouts for the rest of their lives.  Don't they deserve a voice now?

If we're going to toss our country away on runaway spending and benefits, why not be above-board about it?


                             So... why not let the dead vote?

                                                       

[Warph]

San Bernardino, California – On the front door of the San Bernardino city hall is a sign that reads: "Out of Order." Broke city, broken door: There's a certain pleasing symmetry in the fact that the San Bernardino city council meets behind a door that, like the city government itself, does not work and is in need of replacement. On this particular evening in late July, the council has met to make public what everybody already knows: Intellectually bankrupt, morally bankrupt — the city is under criminal investigation for sundry financial shenanigans — San Bernardino is above all old-fashioned bankrupt bankrupt, a pitiful penniless pauper that cannot even afford a cup of coffee: Seriously — the coffee guy wants cash up front now and has stopped serving the municipal office building until the city makes good on its latte liabilities. This is a paddle-free scato-riparian fiscal expedition of the first order.


San Bernardino spends about 75 percent of its general-fund budget on salaries, benefits, and pensions, with the vast majority of those expenses coming from one class of employee: public-safety workers, meaning cops and firemen, who earn as much as $230,000 a year with overtime. Their pensions, as will not surprise anybody who has been paying attention to government finances in recent years, are extraordinarily generous.

In 2007, a consulting firm warned the city that its budget was in trouble because its personnel costs were growing considerably more quickly than revenue, and the city's response was #. . .# to offer even more generous pensions in the same year.

The firemen are fat and happy in the California sunshine, but the rest of San Bernardino is not doing as well: "When times were good, my wife and I didn't go hog-wild and play the let's-get-a-bigger-house game," says Mike Potter, who works for a local construction firm. "But now times aren't good. At my company, 50 percent of the employees have been laid off, and I've taken a 15 percent pay cut. I was the head of engineering, and now I'm also a part-time receptionist and janitor." He is one of the lucky ones — the local unemployment rate runs around 15 percent — and he is blunt on the subject of what encumbers San Bernardino and other bankruptcy-bound California cities: "The public-employee unions are killing us. They are killing our cities, our states, and our country."

[Warph]

Clint Eastwood comes out of the closet....



...and endorses Mitt Romney.

In recent years, Hollywood conservatives have been as deep in the closet as 1950s gays. But Barack Obama, the man of hope and change, has changed that. The times are so terrible that more and more entertainment industry conservatives are coming out and risking irritating their fuddy-duddy liberal peers, maybe even losing a job or two into the bargain.

The latter is not a problem for the latest Hollywood con to come out, Clint Eastwood, who just publicly endorsed Romney with the words "the country is in need of a boost." (No kidding!) Clint has arguably been America's finest director for the last decade or so. The likes of Sean Penn abandoned their bourgeois lefty politics in a heartbeat to work with him. So no job issues for Clint.

And everyone has known Eastwood was a man of the right for years now. He just hasn't made a very big deal about it, unlike the mouthier libs. He has more class. Clint is a figure out of old Hollywood when stars shut their mouths and did their work.

So his coming out is not inconsequential. One wonders what his peers — the Redfords, Beattys, etc. – think. Some of them are such knee-jerk liberals that they probably just put it down to Clint imitating his make-my-day character and don't give it another thought. But I suspect not all. The extremity of the economic situation is not lost on all these people. They just don't have the guts to speak. Walking around Hollywood now is not like it was a year or two ago. You don't hear anyone publicly defending Obama. What you get mostly is silence and a seeming desire to change the subject.

Whether Clint is the stalking horse for more major entertainment figures to start coming out for Romney remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: After three plus years of the Obama administration, it's easier for Hollywood conservatives to declare themselves, not harder. What an irony.




          "Make My Day, Mitt!"

[Warph]

Mars Rover "Curiosity" Lands on Mars Sunday 08/05/2012

           
"This artist's scoreboard displays a fictional game between Mars and Earth, with Mars in the lead. It refers to the success rate of sending missions to Mars, both as orbiters and landers. Of the previous 39 missions targeted for Mars from around the world, 15 have been successes and 24 failures. For baseball fans, that's a batting average of .385. The United States has had 13 successes out of 18 attempts, or a "batting average" of .722. NASA's Curiosity rover, set to land on the Red Planet the evening of Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT), will mark the United States' 19th attempt to tackle the challenge of Mars, and the world's 40th attempt."
 

Remember those spunky little rovers that were landed on Mars, sending back pictures of the Red Planet for years on end?  Well, another rover is scheduled to touch down on Mars this Sunday, August 6.

It's the size of an SUV, with massive digging arms, lasers, and automated laboratories that may settle the question of Martian life once and for all.  The plan is for this 2000 pound vehicle, named "Curiosity," to be dropped inside a Martian crater that appears to have once held water.  The difficulty of this landing, requiring pin-point precision of all systems, is being described as "seven minutes of terror" for the NASA team trying to pull this off.

If it works, we will greatly expand our knowledge of Mars.  And have some sublime photos of another world.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120804.html

           
"This graphic shows the locations of the cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover. The rover's mast features seven cameras: the Remote Micro Imager, part of the Chemistry and Camera suite; four black-and-white Navigation Cameras (two on the left and two on the right) and two color Mast Cameras (Mastcams). The left Mastcam has a 34-millimeter lens and the right Mastcam has a 100-millimeter lens. There is one camera on the end of a robotic arm that is stowed in this graphic; it is called the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI).

There are nine cameras hard-mounted to the rover: two pairs of black-and-white Hazard Avoidance Cameras in the front, another two pair mounted to the rear of the rover, (dashed arrows in the graphic) and the color Mars Descent Imager (MARDI)."

           
"Oblique View of Gale Crater, Mars, with Vertical Exaggeration"
Gale Crater, where the rover Curiosity of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will land in August 2012, contains a mountain rising from the crater floor. This oblique view of Gale Crater, looking toward the southeast, is an artist's impression using two-fold vertical exaggeration to emphasize thearea's topography. Curiosity's landing site is on the crater floor northeast of the mountain. The crater's diameter is 96 miles (154 kilometers).

The image combines elevation data from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, image data from the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and color information from Viking Orbiter imagery.

[Warph]

How Crooked Is Harry Reid?


According to Open Secrets, Senator Harry Reid has a minimum net worth of $2,827,056.00, a maximum worth of $6,307,999.00 and an average net worth of $4,567,527.00. Why all the discrepancies?

Because our leaders, much as they set up campaign finance laws to protect themselves, have set up their disclosure requirements to hide things. They don't really want us to know how much they have and thus the millions of dollars of variance possible in Reid's fortune.

Still, taking that nearly $4.6 million average for Reid seems fair – if it's really off, then it's up to Reid to correct the record. And that is quite a rise for a man who endlessly reminds us was born poor.

I'm pretty sure I'm safe in saying that for everyone reading this, that is quite a lot of money. In fact, more money than any of us are likely to (a) ever have or (b) even know what to do with, if we did have it. Lots of people start poor, work hard, and get rich – in the private sector.

The problem, for Harry Reid, is that since he graduated college, there hasn't been a lot of time outside of government service. Reid was elected to the State Assembly in 1966 and in the past 43 years (when Reid went from 27 years old to 70 – and your humble correspondent went from 2 to 45), the only gap in public service was the two years in the mid-70′s between his term as Lt. Governor and his service on the Nevada Gaming Commission. And during that time he ran for Mayor of Las Vegas, leaving little time to build up a fortune in the private sector.

Right now, as Senate Majority Leader, Reid earns $193,400.00 per year – a back-bencher earns $174,000.00.

Reid has been earning that 193 grand for a few years, but when he first entered the Senate in 1987, I think the Senate salary was about $125,000.00 per year. In order to build up $4.6 million dollars over the past 43 years, Reid would have had to sock aside – out of various government salaries – nearly $107,000.00 per year.

Does anyone want to believe that Reid has done this? That he has saved his government-salary pennies (including for all those years when he made far less than even $107,000.00 per year) and built up his fortune just out of the money we know he's been earning since he entered public office? And what if Reid's fortune is actually closer to the higher estimate of $6.3 million?

It's just not credible that Reid has done this just out of his government salary. The man has raised 5 kids, through college. His various government salaries were enough to live on but how, with all the expenses, did Reid build up so much money? What did he do? How did he do it?

How does a man who's "product" is legislation make so much money that he can build up more than four and a half million dollars of net worth?

Its small wonder that Reid believes in the power of government to make things good. They've certainly made things good for him. He's risen from the son of a hard-rock miner to a fabulously wealthy Senate Majority Leader. Being in government, for Reid, has been like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He hasn't had to work for money, but he's managed to acquire quite a lot of it.

But is this what we want? Do we want people who enter politics poor and leave it very rich? Nothing wrong with a poor man being in government. Nothing wrong with being a rich man in government. But to start poor and end rich while never doing anything in the private sector is a clear indicator of trading on one's position.

And this is why Reid wants so desperately to remain in power – because it's all he's got.

The whole of Reid's position in life has been built on his government office. Wealth, power and prestige, for Reid, are dependent upon his remaining in office. To lose office is to lose the ability to, say, build up another four million dollars. It's not like Reid has any marketable skills for the private sector – even his skill as a lawyer is probably rusty as he hasn't done any real legal practice since the 1960′s.

Reid, out of the Senate, is a nobody.

Reid is asking us to entrust him with 6 more years in the United States Senate. Before we do such a thing, it is fair for us to ask: "Reid, how did you become a rich man?"

All evidence indicates that Reid has enriched himself off his government position and unless we get evidence, from Reid, to the contrary, we daren't re-elect him. Nevada is in trouble and we need leaders who are for us, not just living off us.

[redcliffsw]

Why the disclosure requirements in the first place?

We ought to be looking where they stand.  How much government money has Reid voted to
send to corporations and people?  That ought to be a real issue with Americans - don't ya think? 

It's no wonder that conservatives like Ron Paul do not draw the interest of a majority of the citizens. 
On the Presidential side we have two (2) socilaists - Obama and Romney.

Meanwhile, some in Elk County are rejoicing over a proposed County "Revitalization" program as their
contribution to the create a greater government "stimulus" movement in America.  We'll see if the
socialists get a victory with their own local stimulus package or if Americans will be counted to stand against tyranny.

   

[Warph]

Why the disclosure requirements in the first place?

Why not?  Here is a few items on how crooked Dirty Harry is.  The American ought to know this, don't ya think   If you get a chance, Watch "Casino"... Dick Smothers plays Dirty Harry, the gambling Czar in the film.This is how Dirty Harry made the bulk of his money... he and his mafia buddies.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Harry_Reid#Improper_donation_from_lobbyist

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1561650/posts

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/honest-harry-reid-got-11m-for-land-he-didnt-own

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2914866/posts?page=3 [/color]





We ought to be looking where they stand.  How much government money has Reid voted to
send to corporations and people?  That ought to be a real issue with Americans - don't ya think? 


Senator Harry Reid's Ethical Scandals

Over the course of his political career, Reid has been implicated in several serious ethics scandals:
In a 1998 real estate deal engineered by Jay Brown (a former casino lawyer and a longtime friend of Reid), the senator purchased two undeveloped residential-property lots on Las Vegas' rapidly growing outskirts for approximately $400,000. Reid bought one of the parcels on his own, and the second one jointly with Brown. One of the sellers was a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap supported by Reid. In 2001 Reid sold both of his lots for $400,000 to a limited liability corporation created by Jay Brown, but he never disclosed the sale on his annual public ethics report. Nor did he inform Congress that he held any stake in Brown's company. As far as Congress knew, Reid was still the owner of the two lots he had purchased three years earlier.

In 2004 Brown's company, having negotiated with local officials to rezone the property for a shopping center, sold the land to other developers in a deal that earned Reid $1.1 million -- a $700,000 profit on his initial investment. Reid falsely reported the transaction to Congress as a personal land sale.

In 2001 Reid paid cash for a $750,000 condominium at the Washington, D.C. Ritz-Carlton where he resides. When he subsequently gave Christmas bonuses (in 2002, 2004, and 2005) to the doorman and other support staff at his building, he used $3,300 in campaign donations rather than his own separate funds -- in contravention of federal election law. Reid's campaign falsely listed the bonuses as campaign "salary" expenditures for two of the years in question, and as a "contribution" for the other year. When news of Reid's misappropriation of campaign funds became public in 2006, the senator's office said the listing as salary had been a "clerical error." Added Reid: "I am reimbursing the campaign from my own pocket to prevent this issue from being used in the current campaign season to deflect attention from Republican failures."

In a $286 billion federal transportation bill passed by Congress in 2005, Reid secured $300 million in earmarks for projects in his home state, including $18 million to fund the construction of a bridge spanning the Colorado River. On the Arizona side of that bridge, Reid owned 160 acres of undeveloped land around which many new housing units were being built. Noting that the new bridge would cause the value of Reid's property to skyrocket, Norman Ornstein, co-author of a book that examines earmarking, said: "It's a really bad idea for lawmakers to earmark projects when they have a financial interest that could in any way be affected by it." Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted: "Unwittingly, the taxpayer may have helped inflate the value" of Reid's land.

Between 2002 and 2006, Reid intervened to gain monumental government concessions on behalf of a powerful Nevada land developer, Harvey Whittemore, who wished to build thousands of homes and numerous golf courses on 43,000 acres of barren land in an area called Coyote Springs, an hour northeast of Las Vegas. This land had a number of federal restrictions on its use: One-fourth of it was off-limits to developers because of federal protections for an "endangered" species of desert tortoise that dwelt there; another one-fourth was government-owned and was subject to a federal power-line right of way; and the territory overall was rife with streams and washes that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated as crucial to the health of the desert's ecosystem, and was therefore generally off-limits to construction.

Thanks to Senator Reid's intercession, however, the Bureau of Land Management agreed to relocate the tortoises to an adjacent federal preserve, thereby opening that portion of Coyote Springs to developers.

In 2002 Reid inserted some obscure provisions into a land-management bill that relocated the aforementioned power corridor, thereby apparently freeing Whittemore to build on the 10,500-acre parcel he coveted. But the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee balked at the deal, and Reid in turn negotiated an alternate arrangement where Whittemore was permitted to purchase the land at a fair market rate while the government relocated the corridor.

Finally, in 2005 Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign used their influence with the EPA to eliminate the environmental-impact obstacle.

In return for Reid's efforts, Whittemore gave tens of thousands of dollars to the senator's political campaigns and to his leadership fund (which Reid used to help bankroll the campaigns of fellow Democrats). In addition, Whittemore gave $5,000 to each of Reid's two sons, to finance their efforts to win local political offices. The developer also hired one of those sons as his personal lawyer to represent him in his dealings with federal officials.

Between 2001 and 2004, Reid wrote at least four letters pressing the Bush administration to take action on certain issues of importance to Indian tribes that were clients of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Abramoff, whose staff was in regular contact with Reid's office, lobbied on behalf of tribes involved in the gambling casino industry; he would later be convicted in federal court for defrauding those tribes. Each time Reid wrote a letter on behalf of the Indian tribes, he collected donations from Abramoff and his lobbying partners and clients around the same time period. All told, these donations totaled nearly $68,000. Also between 2001 and 2004, Reid received more than $50,000 directly from four Indian tribes that were clients of Abramoff.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/SenatorHarryReidsEthicalScandals.html




Dirty Harry's Voting Record in the Senate:

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/reidvotingrecord.html

During his legislative career, a few votes that Senator Harry Reid has voted thru 2009:

*in favor of a 2003 bill to ban oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge;

*against a 2007 proposal to permit natural gas exploration and extraction at least fifty miles off the coast of Virginia;

*in favor of a 1993 amendment to reduce funding for ballistic-missile defense programs;

*against major tax-cut proposals in 1999, 2000, 2000 (again), 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2006;

*in favor of an October 2002 joint resolution to authorize the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against Iraq;

*against a 2006 proposal to create military commissions to try unlawful enemy combatants for war crimes they had committed against the U.S.;

*in favor of a 2007 proposal to impose an arbitrary timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq;

*in favor of a 1995 amendment to make it easier for law-enforcement authorities to wiretap roving terrorism suspects;

*in favor of a 2006 proposal authorizing the FBI to conduct "roving wiretaps" and to access certain business records, as well as to make most provisions of the Patriot Act permanent;

*in favor of a 2008 amendment removing telecommunications companies' immunity from the FISA Amendments Act of 2008;

*in favor of the 2006 Immigration Reform Bill, which would have created a path to citizenship for all illegal aliens who had resided in the U.S. for at least five years;

*in favor of a 2006 bill to finance the construction of several hundred miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, and for additional measures to stem the flow of illegal immigration;

*against two other proposals (in 2006 and 2008) to finance the construction of border fencing and other border-protection measures;

*in favor of a 2007 proposal to end the use of a point-based immigration system, (i.e., a system that seeks to ensure that people with skills that society needs are given preference for entry into the United States);

*in favor of affirmative-action policies awarding preferential treatment to business enterprises owned by nonwhite minorities and women;

*in favor of a 1996 welfare-reform bill designed to move large numbers of people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs;

*against a 1993 amendment banning the possession of certain semiautomatic firearms;

*against a 2004 proposal to ban lawsuits against gun manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and importers for damages resulting from the misuse of their products by others;

*in favor of a 2005 bill that similarly would have banned lawsuits against gun dealers and manufacturers;

*in favor of separate bills (in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2003) designed to ban the late-term procedure commonly known as "partial-birth abortion";

*in favor of a 2004 proposal to make it an added criminal offense for someone to injure or kill a fetus while carrying out a crime against a pregnant woman; and

*in favor of a 1996 bill defining marriage exclusively as a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.

http://www.ontheissues.org/Senate/Harry_Reid.htm
http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/legislative/a_three_sections_with_teasers/votes.htm


It's no wonder that conservatives like Ron Paul do not draw the interest of a majority of the citizens. 
On the Presidential side we have two (2) socilaists - Obama and Romney.

Ron Paul Who



Meanwhile, some in Elk County are rejoicing over a proposed County "Revitalization" program as their
contribution to the create a greater government "stimulus" movement in America.  We'll see if the
socialists get a victory with their own local stimulus package or if Americans will be counted to stand against tyranny.

Good Luck with that.