Despite Congressional Ban On Giving Them Taxpayer Money Obama Hired ACORN As Obamacare Navigators

Remember Acorn?  Acorn was been charged or convicted of voter registration fraud in (by my count) 16 different states most of them between 2004-2009 (here is a partial list) . In the DNC Chair's own state, ACORN tried to register Mickey Mouse.  With all that fraud going on  Congress passed a congressional ban on federal funding for the corrupt group (Defund ACORN Act). But that didn't stop Obama. Judicial Watch has obtained documents that show a chunk of taxpayer money went to an affiliate serving as an Obamacare “navigator.”

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) violated the ACORN funding ban by awarding a Louisiana nonprofit called Southern United Neighborhoods (SUN) a $1.3 million Obamacare navigator grant to recruit customers for the president’s disastrous healthcare law and help them “navigate” the complicated insurance exchanges. Headquartered in New Orleans, SUN is dedicated to combating poverty, discrimination and community deterioration that keep low-income people from taking advantage of their rights and opportunities, according to its website.

The group shares its address—and government grants—with another like-minded nonprofit called United Labor Unions Council Local 100, established by Wade Rathke, the radical left-wing community organizer that also founded ACORN. It’s not clear in the documents obtained by JW how much of the $1.3 million HHS grant actually went to Rathke’s local, which is one of SUN’s four partner organizations, but the point remains that the group is an ACORN successor specifically prevented by federal law from receiving taxpayer dollars.

One good thing that Congress did with the recently passed Cromnibus bill was the part funding HHS and the departments of Labor and Education included language banning any money from going to ACORN.

“None of the funds made available under this or any other Act, or any prior Appropriations Act, may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, allied organizations, or successors,” the bill says. This language is not included in the acts to fund any other government agency, though technically the law still forbids it.

ACORN didn't die from the lack of federal funds, they just changed their names an broke up into tiny parts.  It had a new name but the same rancid smell. (Note: if you are interested in learning more about ACORN's crooked history grab a copy of  and its criminal activities, allow me to suggest Matthew Vadum's Book "Subversion, Inc." 

A year later a separate JW probe found that the Obama administration gave an ACORN director named Joe McGavin nearly half a billion dollars to offer “struggling” Illinois homeowners mortgage assistance. The money was part of a $7.6 billion Treasury Department program to help the “unemployed or substantially underemployed” make their mortgage payments. McGavin was director of counseling for ACORN Housing in Chicago and operations manager for a Chicago ACORN offshoot called Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA) shortly before getting the money.

It doesn't matter that ACORN is a crooked enterprise and banned by congress from receiving, this president takes care of his cronies.  

James O'Keefe Answers Donna Brazile With New Must Watch Video Exposing Voter Fraud In Colorado

When Democratic Party wonk and progressive ideologue Donna Brazile tweeted that there was no concrete evidence of voter fraud, she must have forgotten the ACORN scandals exposed in part by James O'Keefe.

When Project Veritas' James O'Keefe saw the tweet he promised some new havoc which would prove her wrong. Today he delivered again.

A video released on Wednesday by O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has agents going undercover and recording Senator Mark Udall advocates in Colorado condoning voter fraud. (By the way James the mustache looks good you should grow one).

One woman, Meredith Hicks, the Director for Work For Progress, says, “That’s not even like lying or stealing, if someone throws out a ballot, like you want to fill it out you should do it.”

The nearly eight-minute video has case after case of O’Keefe talking to different Democratic operatives admitting to possible voter fraud.

One woman who works for Greenpeace told O’Keefe where he can find recycled or discarded mail in ballots to fill out for Udall and give him the extra votes.

Another woman, Nicole Hanlen, directed a PV agent to a location where out-of-state people from Oregon can cast their vote by just using bills and not a Colorado I.D.

Knowing O'Keefe I am sure there is more coming. Watch the video below:

When Valerie Jarret and Barack Obama Were Chicago-Style Slum Lords

A version of this story was originally posted on this site in late June 2008.  But in light of Judicial Watch's release of the relevant documents, it is an appropriate time for its re-telling.

Below is the updated story of how State Senator Barack Obama pushed through and protected a housing development deal for Tony Rezko and Valerie Jarret , and how from day-one the housing was a nightmare for its low-income residents.

Tony Rezko and Six of his real estate partners were involved in the deal , they all provided tons of cash to Obama's campaign fund. The residents received much less than what they paid for. It was managed by Senior White House Adviser Valerie Jarrett. Her company managed the property as its moved from a low-income housing project to a hell-hole.

The name of the development was Grove Parc Plaza, it  contained 504 apartments  and sat in the district  Barack Obama represented for eight years as a State Senator. The federal government subsidized the apartments for people who can't afford to live anywhere else. The problem is that it wasn't safe to live there.

In June of 2008  ninety-nine of the apartments were  empty, most of them were totally dilapidated as the result of problems that were never fixed such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scampered through the halls.  Sewage backed up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings were demolished soon after this investigation was published by the Boston Globe.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc, like Solyndra, like the Small Pox vaccine that doesn't work, like the auto bailout and other prominent  failures once he moved to the White House, was the result of crony capitalism. The site was  developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters who profited from government subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes and the surrounding neighborhoods became decrepit.

"No one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about it," said Cynthia Ashley, who has lived at Grove Parc since 1994.

Obama's campaign, in a written response to Globe questions, affirmed the candidate's support of public-private partnerships as an alternative to public housing, saying that Obama has "consistently fought to make livable, affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods available to all."

The campaign did not respond to questions about whether Obama was aware of the problems with buildings in his district during his time as a state senator, nor did it comment on the roles played by people connected to the senator.

Perhaps they didn't comment because he couldn't blame Bush. Obama worked with an interesting cast of characters on the project.

Valerie Jarrett was the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found over 1,800 violations.

Jarret was a big advocate of Obama's policy of She that public-private partnerships are superior to public housing. 

"Government is just not as good at owning and managing as the private sector because the incentives are not there," said Jarrett, whose company manages more than 23,000 apartments. "I would argue that someone living in a poor neighborhood that isn't 100 percent public housing is by definition better off." 

Allison Davis, who was Obama's first boss as a lawyer, and the man who showed him the Chicago Politics way of doing things:

Over a decade, Davis’s companies received more than $100 million in subsidies to renovate more than 1,500 Chicago apartments. In some cases he partnered with Tony Rezko. In 1998 they created Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners LLP. The partnership created New Evergreen/Sedgwick, a $10.7 million renovation of five walk-up buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood that was subsidized by nearly $6 million in state loans and federal tax credits.

This was made possible by a $1 million investment provided by the Woods Fund while Obama and Bill Ayers were on the board. (Another big Woods Fund recipient while they served was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was “ACORN)." Maintenance conditions at New Evergreen/Sedgwick deteriorated rapidly, including plumbing failures that channeled sewage into apartments. New Evergreen/Sedgwick was managed by a company run by Allison Davis’s son, Cullen Davis, also an Obama campaign contributor.

Antoin "Tony" Rezko,  was the most important fund-raiser for Obama's early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas buy his home in 2005.

Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama's own accounting.

The story of Grove Parc begins with Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was elected in 1989. Under Daley the city launched a massive plan to let private companies tear down the projects and build mixed-income communities on the same land. 

The city also hired private companies to manage the remaining public housing. And it subsidized private companies to create and manage new affordable housing, some of which was used to accommodate tenants displaced from public housing.

Chicago's plans drew critics from the start. They asked why the government should pay developers to perform a basic public service - one successfully performed by governments in other cities. And they noted that privately managed projects had a history of deteriorating because guaranteed government rent subsidies left companies with little incentive to spend money on maintenance.

Most of all, they alleged that Chicago was interested primarily in redeveloping projects close to the Loop, the downtown area that was seeing a surge of private development activity, shunting poor families to neighborhoods farther from the city center. Only about one in three residents was able to return to the redeveloped projects.

"They are rapidly displacing poor people, and these companies are profiting from this displacement," said Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle of Southside Together Organizing for Power, a community group that seeks to help tenants stay in the same neighborhoods.

"The same exact people who ran these places into the ground," the private companies paid to build and manage the city's affordable housing, "now are profiting by redeveloping them."

Barack Obama was among the many Chicago residents who shared Daley's conviction that private companies would make better landlords than the Chicago Housing Authority, which is something most conservatives would agree with providing it was free of cronyism. 

He [Obama]once told the Chicago Tribune that he had briefly considered becoming a developer of affordable housing. But after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, he turned down a job with Tony Rezko's development company, Rezmar, choosing instead to work at the civil rights law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, then led by Allison Davis.

The firm represented a number of nonprofit companies that were partnering with private developers to build affordable housing with government subsidies.

Obama sometimes worked on their cases. In at least one instance, he represented the nonprofit company that owned Grove Parc, Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., when it was sued by the city for failing to adequately heat one of its apartment complexes....

... In 2001, Obama and a Republican colleague, William Peterson, sponsored a successful bill that increased state subsidies for private developers. The law let developers designated by the state raise up to $26 million a year by selling tax credits to Illinois residents. For each $1 in credits purchased, the buyer was allowed to decrease his taxable income by 50 cents.

Obama also cosponsored the original version of a bill creating an annual fund to subsidize rents for extremely low-income tenants, although it did not pass until 2005, after he had left the state Senate.

"He was very passionate about the issues," said Julie Dworkin of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, who worked with Obama on affordable housing issues. "He was someone we could go to and count on him to be there."

The developers gave Obama their financial support. Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko all served on Obama's campaign finance committee when he won a seat in the US Senate in 2004.

Obama has continued to support increased subsidies as a presidential candidate, calling for the creation of an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which could distribute an estimated $500 million a year to developers. The money would be siphoned from the profits of two mortgage companies created and supervised by the federal government, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And we all know that Fannie and Freddie had money to spare?!?!?

"I will restore the federal government's commitment to low-income housing," Obama wrote last September in a letter to the Granite State Organizing Project, an umbrella group for several dozen New Hampshire religious, community, and political organizations. He added, "Our nation's low-income families are facing an affordable housing crisis, and it is our responsibility to ensure this crisis does not get worse by ineffective replacement of existing public-housing units."

One of the earliest public-private partnerships of the type supported by Daley and Obama took place in the Woodlawn neighborhood, a checkerboard of battered apartment buildings and vacant lots just south of the University of Chicago.

Grove Parc Plaza opened there in 1990 as a redevelopment of an older housing complex. The buildings had a new owner and a major renovation funded by the federal government. Even the name Grove Parc Plaza was new.

The owner, a local nonprofit company called Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., was led by two of the neighborhood's most powerful ministers, Arthur Brazier and Leon Finney. Obama had relationships with both men. In 1999, he donated $500 of his campaign funds to another of their community groups, The Woodlawn Organization.

Woodlawn Preservation hired a private management firm, William Moorehead and Associates, to oversee the complex. In 2001, the company lost that contract and a contract to manage several public housing projects for allegedly failing to do its job. The company's head, William Moorehead, was subsequently convicted of embezzling almost $1 million in management fees.

Woodlawn Preservation hired a new property manager, Habitat Co. At the time, the company was headed by its founder, Daniel Levin, also a major contributor to Obama's campaigns. Valerie Jarrett was executive vice president.

Residents say the complex deteriorated under Moorehead's management and continued to decline after Habitat took over. A maintenance worker at the complex says money often wasn't even available for steel wool to plug rat holes. But as late as 2003, a routine federal inspection still gave conditions at Grove Parc a score of 82 on a 100-point scale.

When inspectors returned in 2005, they found conditions were significantly worse. Inspectors gave the complex a score of 56 and warned that improvements were necessary. They returned the following year and found things had reached a new low. Grove Parc got a score of 11 and a final warning. Three months later, inspectors found there had been insufficient improvements and moved to seize the complex from Woodlawn Preservation.

After negotiations with tenants, the government agreed to allow a new company, Preservation of Affordable Housing, a Boston-based firm, to replace Habitat as the manager of Grove Parc. The company is negotiating to buy the development, which would then be demolished and replaced with new housing.

The Woodlawn and Habitat (Jarrett) people made excuses for the disrepair. 

Officials at Woodlawn Preservation say the government didn't give them enough money to properly maintain Grove Parc. Habitat's Jarrett declined to comment on Grove Parc in particular but said it is hard to manage something you don't own.

But other Chicago developers and housing activists say federal subsidies can be adequate if managed properly. They say Grove Parc stands apart for how badly it fell into disrepair.

In other words the took the money and made the tenants live in squalor.

"Grove Parc is quite an exception to what we've normally done because it's in such bad shape," said the nonprofit's chief executive, Amy Anthony. "These complexes are often tired, they're always denser than today's philosophy, but they're not usually anywhere near as deteriorated."

Similar problems also plagued the next generation of affordable housing development in Obama's district, created as part of the Daley administration's efforts to subsidize smaller apartment buildings scattered throughout neighborhoods.

One of the largest recipients of the subsidies was Rezmar Corp., founded in 1989 by Tony Rezko, who ran a company that sold snacks at city beaches, and Daniel Mahru, who ran a company that sold ice to Rezko. Neither man had development experience.

Over the next nine years, Rezmar used more than $87 million in government grants, loans, and tax credits to renovate about 1,000 apartments in 30 Chicago buildings. Companies run by the partners also managed many of the buildings, collecting government rent subsidies.

Rezmar collected millions in development fees but fell behind on mortgage payments almost immediately. On its first project, the city government agreed to reduce the company's monthly payments from almost $3,000 to less than $500.

By the time Obama entered the state Senate in 1997, the buildings were beginning to deteriorate. In January 1997, the city sued Rezmar for failing to provide adequate heat in a South Side building in the middle of an unusually cold winter. It was one of more than two dozen housing-complaint suits filed by the city against Rezmar for violations at its properties.

People who lived in some of the Rezmar buildings say trash was not picked up and maintenance problems were ignored. Roofs leaked, windows whistled, insects moved in.

"In the winter I can feel the cold air coming through the walls and the sockets," said Anthony Frizzell, 57, who has lived for almost two decades in a Rezmar building on South Greenwood Avenue. "They didn't insulate it or nothing."

Sharee Jones, who lives in another former Rezko building one block away, said her apartment was rat-infested for years.

"You could hear them under the floor and in the walls, and they didn't do nothing about it," Jones said.

Like all good progressives eventually they went to the government for money.

By the time Rezmar asked Chicago's city government for a loan on its final subsidized development, in 1998, the city's housing commissioner was describing the company in a memo as being in "bad shape." The Daley administration still made the $3.1 million loan.

Of course Daley gave them the cash, this was Chicago. Shortly getting the loan, Rezmar switched from subsidized housing to high-end development, using the money it had made on those subsidized housing develpoments. Rezko's companies also stopped managing the subsidized complexes.

"Affordable housing run by private companies just doesn't work," Mahru, who no longer works with Rezko, said in an interview with the Globe. "It's difficult, if not impossible, for a private company to maintain affordable housing for low-income tenants."

Responsibility for several buildings fell to the Chicago Equity Fund, which had purchased government tax credits from Rezmar to help finance the projects. After Rezko walked away, the fund was obliged to maintain the buildings as affordable housing. If it did not, it would have to repay the government for the tax credits. The fund found the buildings in terrible condition. In a 2001 plea to the state to temporarily suspend payments on its mortgages, a fund executive wrote that heating problems, lapsed maintenance, and uncollected rent made the buildings almost impossible to manage. Most of the buildings have since been foreclosed upon, forcing the tenants to find new housing. All the while, Tony Rezko was forging a close friendship with Barack Obama. When Obama opened his campaign for state Senate in 1995, Rezko's companies gave Obama $2,000 on the first day of fund-raising. Save for a $500 contribution from another lawyer, Obama didn't raise another penny for six weeks. Rezko had essentially seeded the start of Obama's political career. As Obama ascended, Rezko became one of his largest fund-raisers. And in 2005, Rezko and his wife helped the Obamas purchase the house where they now live. Eleven of Rezmar's buildings were located in the district represented by Obama, containing 258 apartments. The building without heat in January 1997, the month Obama entered the state Senate, was in his district. So was Jones's building with rats in the walls and Frizzell's building that lacked insulation. And a redistricting after the 2000 Census added another 350 Rezmar apartments to the area represented by Obama. But Obama has contended that he knew nothing about any problems in Rezmar's buildings. After Rezko's assistance in Obama's home purchase became a campaign issue, at a time when the developer was awaiting trial in an unrelated bribery case, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that the deterioration of Rezmar's buildings never came to his attention. He said he would have distanced himself from Rezko if he had known. Other local politicians say they knew of the problems. "I started getting complaints from police officers about particular properties that turned out to be Rezko properties," said Toni Preckwinkle, a Chicago alderman. She had previously received campaign contributions from Rezmar and said she had regarded the company as a model, one of the city's best affordable housing developers. But in the early 2000s, she called Rezko to ask for an explanation for the declining conditions. He told her Rezmar was "getting out of the business," she said - walking away from its responsibility for managing the developments. "I didn't see him nor have anything to do with him after that," she said. Preckwinkle, who [was]will be an Obama delegate at the [2008] Democratic National Convention, said she would not answer any questions about Obama's role in her district, nor his relationship with Rezko.

Allison Davis left his law firm to pursue a full-time career as an affordable housing developer, funded by  subsidies from the Daley administration and aided, at times, by Obama himself.

In several cases, Davis partnered with Tony Rezko. In 1998 the two men created a limited partnership to build an apartment building for seniors on Chicago's South Side. Obama wrote letters on state Senate stationery supporting city and state loans for the project.

In 2000 Davis asked the nonprofit Woods Fund of Chicago for a $1 million investment in a new development partnership, Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners. Obama, a member of the board, voted in favor, helping Davis secure the investment. The following year, Davis assembled another partnership to create New Evergreen/Sedgwick, a $10.7 million renovation of five walk-up buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood. The project, a model of small-scale, mixed-income development, was subsidized by almost $6 million in state loans and federal tax credits. Conditions deteriorated quickly. Chronic plumbing failures consumed the project's financial reserves while leaving undrained sewage in some of the apartments. In October, after repeated complaints from building residents, the city government sued the owners, and a judge imposed a $5,500 fine.

Obama has distanced himself from Rezko since his conviction, but remained close to others in the development community. Jarrett is in the administration. And Obama chose another close friend, Martin Nesbitt, as his campaign treasurer. Nesbitt was the chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, one of the key overseers of the shift toward private management and development and remains and Obama golfing buddy

Congressional Report Quashes The Lie That The IRS Targeted Liberal/Progressive Groups

Now that some of the mainstream media outlets are mentioning the IRS scandal, progressives are coming out of the rafters pointing out that progressive outlets applying for 501 (C)(3) status were targeted as well as the conservative groups.  To paraphrase Bill Clinton, that depends what as--is. Yes its true that there were some progressive groups on the original BOLO (be on the look out) list, but their applications weren't subject to the same enhanced scrutiny, extra questions, delays, etc., that conservative groups received.

Two months ago, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released staff report debunking the claim that the IRS targeted liberal groups as well as Conservative groups.“ The full  report called "Debunking the Myth that the IRS Targeted Progressives: How the IRS and Congressional Democrats Misled America about Disparate Treatment.” is embedded at the end of his post.

According to the report's summary

“[T]he Administration and congressional Democrats have seized upon the notion that the IRS’s targeting was not just limited to conservative applicants,” the report states. “These Democratic claims are flat-out wrong and have no basis in any thorough examination of the facts.  Yet, the Administration’s chief defenders continue to make these assertions in a concerted effort to deflect and distract from the truth about the IRS’s targeting of tax-exempt applicants.”

“[T]here is simply no evidence that any liberal or progressive group received enhanced scrutiny because its application reflected the organization’s political views.”

Among the key findings of the report and their corresponding pages each of the bullet points are backed up by emails and/or testimony:

• IRS’s selected three “test” cases were all conservative organizations: Prescott Tea Party, American Junto, the Albuquerque Tea Party were sent to D.C. for further review (pp. 14-18)

• MYTH: Progressive groups were also targeted. Only seven applications in the IRS backlog contained the word “progressive,” all of which were then approved by the IRS, while Tea Party groups received unprecedented review and experienced years-long delays. While some liberal-oriented groups were singled out for scrutiny, evidence shows it was due to non-political reasons. The IRS’s independent watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), confirms that the IRS treated conservative applicants differently from liberal groups. The inspector general, J. Russell George, wrote that while TIGTA found indications that the IRS had improperly identified Tea Party groups, it “did not find evidence that the criteria [Democrats] identified, labeled ‘Progressives,’ were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2012 timeframe we audited.” He concluded that TIGTA “found no  indication in any of these other materials that ‘Progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention. In fact The IRS
  approved every group with the word “progressive” in its name.(pp. 32-35)

• MYTHS:  False Democratic claims of political targeting about specific groups exposed: Where the IRS identified liberal-oriented groups for scrutiny, evidence shows that it did so for objective, non-political reasons and not because of the groups’ political beliefs. (p.32)

• IRS selectively released documents supporting the misleading claims. The IRS cited 6103 protections for taxpayer information to withhold details about the targeting from the American public, but reversed its decision in August 2013 to release information helpful to its cause. (pp. 11)

• ACORN groups – IRS employees testified that former ACORN affiliates were scrutinized out of concern that they were old organizations improperly applying as new ones and not because of their political beliefs. (pp. 40–42)

• Emerge America – IRS employees testified that Emerge Groups were scrutinized after some had already been approved and the IRS became concerned about improper private benefit – not because of their political beliefs. (pp. 42–44)

• Occupy Wall Street – The Committee has found no evidence that the IRS subjected Occupy applicants to burdensome and intrusive information requests or even seen evidence that “Occupy Wall Street” or an affiliate organization applied to the IRS for non-profit status. (pp. 44–45).

The liberal's claim of that their groups were targeted along with the conservative groups is reminiscent of an apocryphal tale about Microsoft:

A helicopter was flying above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window. Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER." The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position. The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft building because they gave me a technically correct, but completely useless answer."

The Democratic claim that liberal groups were also targeted is is technically correct but totally useless.  Both political persuasions may have been added to the IRS BOLO lists, however it was only the conservative organizations which were subject to the enhanced scrutiny and delayed applications at the center of the IRS scandal.

4 7 2014 IRS Staff Report w Appendix by Jeffrey Dunetz

New Congressional Report Debunks Myth that Liberal Groups Were Also Targeted by IRS

Sorry Rep. Cummings.

As part of the investigation into the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., released a Committee staff report targeted at Rep. Cummings claim that the IRS targeted liberal groups as well as Conservative groups.“ The full  report called "Debunking the Myth that the IRS Targeted Progressives: How the IRS and Congressional Democrats Misled America about Disparate Treatment.” is embedded at the end of his post.

According to the report's summary

“[T]he Administration and congressional Democrats have seized upon the notion that the IRS’s targeting was not just limited to conservative applicants,” the report states. “These Democratic claims are flat-out wrong and have no basis in any thorough examination of the facts.  Yet, the Administration’s chief defenders continue to make these assertions in a concerted effort to deflect and distract from the truth about the IRS’s targeting of tax-exempt applicants.”

“[T]here is simply no evidence that any liberal or progressive group received enhanced scrutiny because its application reflected the organization’s political views.”

Among the key findings of the report:

• IRS’s three “test” cases were all conservative organizations: Prescott Tea Party, American Junto, the Albuquerque Tea Party. (pp. 14-18)

• Congressional Democrats made misleading claims about the targeting. Democratic Members of Congress, including Ranking Member Elijah Cummings, Ranking Member Sander Levin, and Representative Gerry Connolly, made misleading claims that the IRS targeted liberal-oriented groups based on documents selectively produced by the IRS. (pp. 7-13)

• IRS selectively released documents supporting the misleading claims. The IRS cited 6103 protections for taxpayer information to withhold details about the targeting from the American public, but reversed its decision in August 2013 to release information helpful to its cause. (pp. 11)

• MYTH: Progressive groups were also targeted.Only seven applications in the IRS backlog contained the word “progressive,” all of which were then approved by the IRS, while Tea Party groups received unprecedented review and experienced years-long delays. While some liberal-oriented groups were singled out for scrutiny, evidence shows it was due to non-political reasons. (pp. 32-35)

• MYTHS:  False Democratic claims of political targeting about specific groups exposed: Where the IRS identified liberal-oriented groups for scrutiny, evidence shows that it did so for objective, non-political reasons and not because of the groups’ political beliefs. (p.32)

• ACORN groups – IRS employees testified that former ACORN affiliates were scrutinized out of concern that they were old organizations improperly applying as new ones and not because of their political beliefs. (pp. 40–42)
• Emerge America – IRS employees testified that Emerge Groups were scrutinized after some had already been approved and the IRS became concerned about improper private benefit – not because of their political beliefs. (pp. 42–44)
• Occupy Wall Street – The Committee has found no evidence that the IRS subjected Occupy applicants to burdensome and intrusive information requests or even seen evidence that “Occupy Wall Street” or an affiliate organization applied to the IRS for non-profit status. (pp. 44–45)

4 7 2014 IRS Staff Report w Appendix by Jeffrey Dunetz

Hey Liberals Here's at Least 35,750 Reasons We Need Voter ID

Progressive politicians and organizations of the progressive persuasion argue that making people prove their eligibility to vote, will suppress voter turnout, especially in the minority community. But the only minority who will be disenfranchised will be people who have no legal right to vote, have already voted elsewhere, or who are dead.

The progressive contention is there are no real examples of voter fraud so any ID laws are unnecessary. There were numerous examples of voter fraud by ACORN during the 2008 election. For something more recent, examine these statistics presented by the North Carolina State Board of Elections to their State's Joint Legislative Elections Oversight Committee:

• 765 voters with an exact match of first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in N.C. and the other state in the 2012 general election.

• 35,750 voters with the same first and last name and DOB were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in both states in the 2012 general election.

• 155,692 voters with the same first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state – and the latest date of registration or voter activity did not take place within N.C. These findings only take into account data from the 28 states who participated in the 2014 Interstate Crosscheck, leaving out potential voter error and fraud in the 22 states that do not participate in the consortium.

Additionally, during an audit of death records from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Board discovered:

• 50,000 new death records that had not previously been provided to the State Board of Elections.

• 13,416 deceased voters on the voter rolls in October 2013.

• 81 deceased voters that had voter activity after they died.

The concept of one-man, one-vote is essential to the freedoms of the American Republic. Allowing people to vote more than once, or allowing people to vote who by law don't have that right, partially disenfranchises those Americans who are legally voting including minorities. The weight of the legal votes is watered-down by the inclusion of illegal votes. I would argue that protecting the concept of one-man, one-vote should be a top priority of our government and not protecting that right is racist.

Stupid Media Bias Tricks: The "You Must Be Stoned" Edition

Sometimes when I read/listen to, or watch a politician or "reporter" make a gaffe, or say something totally biased, the first thing crossing my mind is, "this person's gotta be totally stoned." Well they might very well be.  But as I write this, less than 48 hours since my shoulder surgery, I am still on Percoset (which eases the pain but doesn't erase it). But surgery or not the search for stupidity and bias must go on.

Since last week we heard the corrupt Charlie Rangel describe the Tea Party as Mean, racist people, who worship Confederate Flag, and Nancy Pelosi caught broken record disease when she said affordable over and over again. Affordable. Affordable. There’s a reason. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable, and Univision showed once again that it is totally owned by the Democratic Party.


In the last week a British paper said the Bard shouldn't be taught in school, kids in a town near Boston played Kill the Jews, LA Anchors dove under their desks, and ACORN may have moved to Crimea as one city in last week's vote had 123% voter turnout.

 Below are the stupid media bias tricks from the last 7 days. Headlines are linked to the full article (and will open a new window). When it is a broadcast story the video/audio will also be found at the end of the link.

So click on the links below and read about the stupid bias tricks of the last week:


Pelosi: It’s the Affordable Care Act. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable.
During her Thursday press conference, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi objected to the use of the term Obamacare and in doing so got kept repeating the word affordable over and over again. " Affordable. Affordable. There’s a reason. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable. Affordable...

Star of Popular Univision Program Hosting President Obama At DNC Fundraiser in Her Home
Univision Star Liliana Estefan, the host of the popular Univision program "El Gordo y la Flaca " show, will host President Obama at a DNC fundraiser at her home in Miami Thursday evening. A Democratic Party official says 25 supporters wi ...

WH Press Secretary Gets Questions from Reporters Before Press Briefing 
According to Catherine Anaya, reporting for Arizona TV station KPHO, the questions Jay Carney answers every day in the White House Press briefing are given to him beforehand. In many cases the reporters have already been given the answers before the bri ...

Bedford Mass. Elementary School Kids Playing 'Jail The Jews'
The Bedford Massachusetts school district is trying to address an alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents in recent months. The incidents include a game called “Jail the Jews” at two elementary schools, and swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti painted on B ...

The Truth About Israel's "Jewish State" Demand
Despite what some commentators say, the demand that Israel be recognized as the Jewish State was not a Netanyahu invention. It actually predates the first “official” Israeli negotiations with the Palestinians during the Rabin administration in 1992. ...

Press Unwelcome At First Lady's Taxpayer Funded "Cultural Exchange" Family Trip To China
Next Wednesday, first lady Michelle Obama, along with her mother and two children, is traveling to China for a cultural exchange with the people of China. But reporters are persona non grata on the taxpayer-funded trip. ...

Charlie Rangel: Tea Party Are "Mean, Racist People" Who Worship Confederate Flag
Rep Charlie Rangel (NY-D) was interviewed on NY1's Inside City Hall on Tuesday night. When asked what the federal government could do to prevent more tragedies such as last week's building explosion in East Harlem, he responded with a tirade abo ...

Professor of Pornography Attacks 16-Year-Old Pro-Life Activist
On March 4th, Mireille Miller-Young associate professor with UCSB ’s Feminist Studies Department physically confronted 16-year-old pro-life activist Thrin Short, her older sister and eleven other activists so violently that after seeing a video of the ass ...

GOP Chair Reince Priebus Repels Chuck Todd's 'Gotcha' Questioning 
In Wednesday' s The Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd, RNC Chairman Rence Priebus had a sharp rejoinder for Todd when Todd knocked a Texas GOP member. ...

'What Fools These Mortals Be'
Guardian columnist and associate director at Salisbury Playhouse Mark Powell makes the suggestion that schools remove Shakespeare from their curriculum because Shakespeare is taught in a way that discourages students from seeing the play s live. ...

Minneapolis German Restaurant Hosts 7th Annual Nazi-Themed Christmas Party​
Gasthof zur Gemütlichkeit, a German restaurant in Minneapolis, Minn. has hosted a Nazi-themed party for the past seven years. This year it's doubling as a Christmas party. ...

NY Times' Shear: "Panic is Starting To Set In Among Democrats"
Hugh Hewitt interviewed Michael Shear, NY Times White House correspondent on his Tuesday radio program. According to Shear, " the panic is starting to set in among Democrats" due to the President's low approval ratings. ...

Obama: You 'Might Have to Switch Doctors'
Interviewed by WebMD President Obama admitted his "you can keep your doctor" promise wasn't true, saying, "T hey’re going to have to make some choices, and they might have to switch doctors in part because they are saving money." ...

Home Depot Founder Compares Populist Attacks on Rich to Nazi Germany
In an interview with Politico, Ken Langone, billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, likened the populist class warfare appeal of the progressives to the Nazis. ...

March Madness? Administration Creates Obamacare Bracket Game
The latest attempt to get millennials to sign up for Obamacare is a March Madness-type bracket game, which went live the day after Selection Sunday. ...

Crimea Vote: 123% Turnout
According to Pravda News Service, 123% of the people who live in the Crimean city of Sevastopol voted in Sunday's referendum regarding whether to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. ...

LA Anchors Dive Under Desks as Earthquake Hits
At approximately 6:25am Pacific Time on Monday, March 17th, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake shook the Los Angeles area, centered near Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey. Those watching the local Fox affiliate KTTV got to see the quake ...

Russian News Anchor: Russia Only Country Able to Turn US into Radioactive Ashes
"Russia is the only country in the world that is really able to turn the US into radioactive ashes." That is how Dmitry Kiselyov began a segment on his Russian TV public affairs program. The statement was not made as a threat of war, but as ...

Newsbusted: Voter Registration Booth Placed At End Of Secret Tunnel Under US/Mexico Border

Never underestimate the ability of progressives to turn a negative into a positive. Last week police discovered a massive tunnel designed to smuggle drugs from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego. The tunnel was equipped with lighting, ventilation and an electric rail system, U.S. authorities said making it one of the most sophisticated secret passages discovered along the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to a report from Newsbusted Anchor Jodie Miller we learn that Congressional Democrats want to hire the remnants of the group ACORN to open a voter registration booth on the American side of the tunnel.

Other news items covered in the latest installment of Newsbusted the weekly faux news feature from Newsbusters.org (embedded below) include; robot astronauts made in Japan; the massive glitch which shut down Facebook; how the delay of the farm bill is effecting people on food stamps; and much, much, more.

Please make sure you watch the video below because something bad always happens to the people who don't. Last week Martin Bashir forgot to press play and yesterday he had to apologize to America.

So If you don't want to have to apologize to America.....you better press the play button below.

Oh and if you cannot see the video player below please click here

How Dare You Call Me NAZI Rep Clyburn-I Have Family Who Died In the Holocaust

Congressman Jim Clyburn was on Sirius/XM's POTUS Channel this morning and he used the opportunity to attack the Right  Wing Bloggers

"You have people's words and phrases being misrepresented and looped through the news media and thrown out there on the Internet, and people run with it because these things start getting reported in the mainstream media, and before you know it, people believe that stuff," Clyburn said.

The consequences of such misrepresentation, Clyburn warned, could be severe.

“The people of Germany believed Hitler’s foolishness that led to the Holocaust. They believed that stuff,” Clyburn said. “People will tend to believe what they hear through the media.

Clyburn singled out “extreme right-wing” bloggers in particular for criticism. He accused such bloggers of forcing Shirley Sherrod to resign from the Department of Agriculture after misrepresenting statements she made to make her appear racially biased. He also said they had libeled the progressive group ACORN, leading to the group’s disbandment. 

Clyburn is talking about people like me. I wrote about the Sherrod Case, and covered the fact that by 2011 Acorn was been charged or convicted of voter registration fraud in 16 different states in recent years. Wassermann-Schultz is ignoring that fact (here is a partial list).

As for the Sherrod Case, Andrew Breitbart does not need me to defend him--he did it well enough himself. 

Attacks on the right wing blogisphere are common practice, but one part of Rep. Clyburn's comments is way over the line. The part where he accused right-wingers of using Hitler-like tactics.

EXCUSE ME? Hitler? REALLY?? How dare he cheapen the memory of the Holocaust with inappropriate references.  I am sick and tired of  Democrats and their fake Shoah references (Shoah is the word Jews use for the Holocaust it's Hebrew for Disaster).

Rep. Clyburn allow me address the charges you made against my colleagues and me by asking  you some questions:
   
Rep. Clyburn..I have many relatives with this on their arm do you have any?

Hitler choose that method of Identifying my relatives because tattooing is prohibited in the Jewish faith.  

Is that what you meant when you compared me to Hitler?

Rep. Clyburn, I never met some of my family because Hitler killed them and buried them in mass graves or cremated their bodies.  When you compared me to Hitler, were you saying I do that to people? 

Are any of your relatives in this photo?

Rep. Clyburn  after the Nazi's gassed their victims they collected their hair, their clothes, glasses,  gold teeth and even artificial limbs to be used by the Reich. With the comparison you made on  Sirius/XM were you saying I do that after I post a story?

Was one of your relatives' artificial legs recycled after they were stripped naked and gassed?

When you compared me ( and other right wing bloggers) to Hitler, did you mean I do  horrible things like gassing innocent victims and collecting their gold teeth and artificial limbs?

If “extreme right-wing” bloggers   didn't force people to put tattoos on their arms, crowd them in to death camps where they would suffer torture till they were gassed, shot, or died some other horrible death, followed by mutilating their corpses by taking out what can be reused--if we didn't do any of that, or anything like it...your comparison to Hitler, is not only false and inappropriate, but it cheapens the memory of the who suffered during the Holocaust and those who try to honor their memories.

Rep. Clyburn your people have also suffered,  they endured the unendurable, the unforgivable horrors of slavery. I would never cheapen the memory of their suffering (or even the later suffering of those who fought for civil rights in this country) by haphazardly calling people racist.  I would never call frivolously call people racist, or slave owners,  so why do you cheapen the memory of what Hitler did to my people?

You want to call me names go ahead it's still a free country, but leave the Shoah out of it!

Rep. Clyburn, you owe the victims of Hitler an apology!

Interview With James O'Keefe About His Book "Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy"

James O'Keefe is one of the "good ones" Beginning with his videos about ACORN in 2008, O'Keefe and his associates have gone under cover to expose progressive lawbreakers. He has been on the front lines and taking the hits. James has written a new book called "Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy." He was just interview by John Hawkins about the book.

Here are a few excerpts:

O'Keefe on the lack of support for conservative journalism.

"And there isn’t enough support and John, I think the reason why is because people in the conservative movement don’t like controversy. They don’t like blood in the water. They don’t like hot water. They don’t like muck — they feel uncomfortable. You know, PJ Media’s Bill Whittle said it perfectly. He said, “Conservatives are so beaten down in the pop culture that they are utterly unwilling to stand up for what they actually believe in.” And when an effective actor comes along and makes change, they throw everything at you. They play dirtier than you can imagine."

O'Keefe on a lawsuit he won.

"I sued David Shuster and Olbermann for defamation, got money and used that money to fund my voter fraud videos."

On the criminalization of journalism.

"Well, it’s not even a double standard anymore. It’s politicizing of the First Amendment. It’s not a Left or Right issue. The Department of Justice gave journalist status to this Curt – I can’t remember his name. Curtis, it’s Curtis Morrison in Kentucky who admitted to eavesdropping through a wall of Mitch McConnell. Now, I defended this guy in the Daily Beast. I argued that the punishment is not commiserate with the crime. It is a felony, but the Department of Justice gave him the status of journalist. Now you have David Gregory on Meet the Press suggesting Glenn Greenwald….that he’s aiding and abetting Snowden by reporting on what Snowden did.

What you have here is the criminalization of journalism depending on when the establishment wants the expose criminalized. Now in Mary Landrieu’s office, I walked into a Federal building using a pretense. But, I showed my driver’s license at the entrance of the door. So there wasn’t even really a pretense. And so I definitely faced severe criminal prosecution for years and my tape of what I did was destroyed. The government deleted the contents of my recording. This is a huge double standard. They lie about me and there’s no video tape to support it. Sometimes there’s even court transcripts to contradict it, but people believe want they want to believe and the Justice Department goes along with it. It’s very troubling."

This is only part of a great interview.  To read the full discussion between John Hawkins and James O'Keefe, click here and visit Right Wing News.

Proud Member of The Cheetos Brigade-Joe Scarborough's Best Source For News

                                               

I guess as of today, I am a proud member of the Cheetos brigade. That's how MSNBC's Joe Scarborough described the bloggers who covered the story of MSNBC's doctored tape, with the fake captions which he aired on his show this past Friday--people who sit in their mom's basement eating Cheetos.  Well Joe, Cheetos aren't Kosher so I can't eat them, and the house my parents raised me in was sold about six months after my mom died (and I never hung out in her basement even as a child), but I like the sound of Cheetos Brigade. Maybe I can get myself a helmet:

I will not argue my version of the facts verses his.  Listen to Joe's  version compare it to what I found (including the source he doesn't  mention)  and you can decide. And most of all read my conclusion 

 So Morning Joe note this, I have three sources, CSPAN, the NY Times and WHIO TV that say the clip on MSNBC was a lie.  Are you going to own up to it? Are you going to apologize to Mitt Romney? Bay Buchanan?

Look I understand the guy has to feed his family, so he must toe the MSNBC line, but at least he could own up to it.

I didn't say there was a vast conspiracy, I said Joe needs to feed the family so he's got to toe the MSNBC line.  I didn't say he was trying to make Romney lose, Joe's passive aggressive coverage of things conservative has been going on for years.  I just said that he was a fake, and showed some other examples of his duplicity.

I would submit to Morning Joe  that if Rush Limbaugh said something they saw as controversial during "the silly season" he have been all over Limbaugh at once.

You see the point is not morning Joe and Mitt Romney, the point is intellectual honesty.  Joe Scarborough blew the story and instead of admitting he screwed up..resorts to name calling.

Two final points.  At the end of his comments Joe tried to make us feel bad for the film editors that who work all night, yadda, yadda, yadda. If this was the first time a MSNBC tape editor showed bias, people would have thought it was an accident. But it isn't.  For example remember the tea party rally where MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer fretted over health care reform protesters legally carrying guns: "A man at a pro-health care reform rally...wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip....there are questions about whether this has racial overtones.... white people showing up with guns." Brewer failed to mention the video was cropped and the "racist" carrying the gun was  was black. Or that video from the WAWA store they edited to make Mitt Romney look out of touch.

And finally about the Cheetos Brigade, I like it.  But if Joe Really means it as a term of derision, let me suggest that he stops stealing the stories we broke.  You know the reporting we do, because the supposed professionals at MSNBC and other networks are to lazy and/or biased to report.

For example, the story about Jerusalem and the other pro-Israel points being left out of the Democratic platform, it was a big discussion on Morning Joe, Joe didn't give the Brigade or the specific Cheetos Brigade member (me) credit for the story.  Dave Weigel called me a troll for breaking that story, at least he gave me credit--unlike Morning Joe. Nor did you give credit when you talked about the Helen Thomas video or any other story broken on this site.

My history is nothing compared to other members of the Cheetos Brigade. Fast and Furious was broken by members of the Cheetos Brigade and until yesterday's story by Univision it was bloggers who exposed most of the cover up.  It was another member of the Cheetos brigade that broke the story that Matt Damon's anti-fracking movie being funded by middle eastern oil tycoons (Lachlan Markay) Anita Moncreif exposed ACORN, Patterico exposed Swatting, Bloggers exposed Solyndra, Heck, there are  members of the Cheetos Brigade like Stacy McCain at the Other McCain, Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, Ace of Spades,  or anybody at Hot Air who break stories almost on a daily basis.

All the above stories were picked up by the Mainstream Media, some were even picked up by Joe Scarborough and used for his show (without the slightest attribution).  So if he wants to call us names--fine go for it, but then ..maybe he and his network should stop stealing our stuff.

Barack Obama: Crony Capitalist Protector of SLUM LORDS

A version of this story was originally posted on this site in late June 2008.  But in light of yesterday's story in the Washington Examiner regarding the Obama You Don't Know, it is an appropriate time for its re-telling.

Below is the updated story of how State Senator Barack Obama pushed through and protected a housing development deal for Tony Rezko and Valerie Jarret , and how from day-one the housing was a nightmare for its low-income residents.

Tony Rezko and Six of his real estate partners were involved in the deal , they all provided tons of cash to Obama's campaign fund. The residents received much less than what they paid for. It was managed by Senior White House Adviser Valerie Jarrett. Her company managed the property as its moved from a low-income housing project to a hell-hole.


The name of the development was Grove Parc Plaza, it  contained 504 apartments  and sat in the district  Barack Obama represented for eight years as a State Senator. The federal government subsidized the apartments for people who can't afford to live anywhere else. The problem is that it wasn't safe to live there.

In June of 2008  ninety-nine of the apartments were  empty, most of them were totally dilapidated as the result of problems that were never fixed such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scampered through the halls.  Sewage backed up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings were demolished soon after this investigation was published by the Boston Globe.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc, like Solyndra, like the Small Pox vaccine that doesn't work, like the auto bailout and other prominent  failures once he moved to the White House, was the result of crony capitalism. The site was  developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters who profited from government subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes and the surrounding neighborhoods became decrepit.

"No one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about it," said Cynthia Ashley, who has lived at Grove Parc since 1994.

Obama's campaign, in a written response to Globe questions, affirmed the candidate's support of public-private partnerships as an alternative to public housing, saying that Obama has "consistently fought to make livable, affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods available to all."

The campaign did not respond to questions about whether Obama was aware of the problems with buildings in his district during his time as a state senator, nor did it comment on the roles played by people connected to the senator.

Perhaps they didn't comment because he couldn't blame Bush. Obama worked with an interesting cast of characters on the project.

Valerie Jarrett was the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found over 1,800 violations.

Jarret was a big advocate of Obama's policy of She that public-private partnerships are superior to public housing. 

"Government is just not as good at owning and managing as the private sector because the incentives are not there," said Jarrett, whose company manages more than 23,000 apartments. "I would argue that someone living in a poor neighborhood that isn't 100 percent public housing is by definition better off." 

Allison Davis, who was Obama's first boss as a lawyer, and the man who showed him the Chicago Politics way of doing things:

Over a decade, Davis’s companies received more than $100 million in subsidies to renovate more than 1,500 Chicago apartments. In some cases he partnered with Tony Rezko. In 1998 they created Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners LLP. The partnership created New Evergreen/Sedgwick, a $10.7 million renovation of five walk-up buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood that was subsidized by nearly $6 million in state loans and federal tax credits.

This was made possible by a $1 million investment provided by the Woods Fund while Obama and Bill Ayers were on the board. (Another big Woods Fund recipient while they served was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was “ACORN)." Maintenance conditions at New Evergreen/Sedgwick deteriorated rapidly, including plumbing failures that channeled sewage into apartments. New Evergreen/Sedgwick was managed by a company run by Allison Davis’s son, Cullen Davis, also an Obama campaign contributor.

Antoin "Tony" Rezko,  was the most important fund-raiser for Obama's early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas buy his home in 2005.

Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama's own accounting.

The story of Grove Parc begins with Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was elected in 1989. Under Daley the city launched a massive plan to let private companies tear down the projects and build mixed-income communities on the same land. 

The city also hired private companies to manage the remaining public housing. And it subsidized private companies to create and manage new affordable housing, some of which was used to accommodate tenants displaced from public housing.

Chicago's plans drew critics from the start. They asked why the government should pay developers to perform a basic public service - one successfully performed by governments in other cities. And they noted that privately managed projects had a history of deteriorating because guaranteed government rent subsidies left companies with little incentive to spend money on maintenance.

Most of all, they alleged that Chicago was interested primarily in redeveloping projects close to the Loop, the downtown area that was seeing a surge of private development activity, shunting poor families to neighborhoods farther from the city center. Only about one in three residents was able to return to the redeveloped projects.

"They are rapidly displacing poor people, and these companies are profiting from this displacement," said Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle of Southside Together Organizing for Power, a community group that seeks to help tenants stay in the same neighborhoods.

"The same exact people who ran these places into the ground," the private companies paid to build and manage the city's affordable housing, "now are profiting by redeveloping them."

Barack Obama was among the many Chicago residents who shared Daley's conviction that private companies would make better landlords than the Chicago Housing Authority, which is something most conservatives would agree with providing it was free of cronyism. 

He [Obama]once told the Chicago Tribune that he had briefly considered becoming a developer of affordable housing. But after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, he turned down a job with Tony Rezko's development company, Rezmar, choosing instead to work at the civil rights law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, then led by Allison Davis.

The firm represented a number of nonprofit companies that were partnering with private developers to build affordable housing with government subsidies.

Obama sometimes worked on their cases. In at least one instance, he represented the nonprofit company that owned Grove Parc, Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., when it was sued by the city for failing to adequately heat one of its apartment complexes....

... In 2001, Obama and a Republican colleague, William Peterson, sponsored a successful bill that increased state subsidies for private developers. The law let developers designated by the state raise up to $26 million a year by selling tax credits to Illinois residents. For each $1 in credits purchased, the buyer was allowed to decrease his taxable income by 50 cents.

Obama also cosponsored the original version of a bill creating an annual fund to subsidize rents for extremely low-income tenants, although it did not pass until 2005, after he had left the state Senate.

"He was very passionate about the issues," said Julie Dworkin of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, who worked with Obama on affordable housing issues. "He was someone we could go to and count on him to be there."

The developers gave Obama their financial support. Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko all served on Obama's campaign finance committee when he won a seat in the US Senate in 2004.

Obama has continued to support increased subsidies as a presidential candidate, calling for the creation of an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which could distribute an estimated $500 million a year to developers. The money would be siphoned from the profits of two mortgage companies created and supervised by the federal government, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And we all know that Fannie and Freddie had money to spare?!?!?

"I will restore the federal government's commitment to low-income housing," Obama wrote last September in a letter to the Granite State Organizing Project, an umbrella group for several dozen New Hampshire religious, community, and political organizations. He added, "Our nation's low-income families are facing an affordable housing crisis, and it is our responsibility to ensure this crisis does not get worse by ineffective replacement of existing public-housing units."

One of the earliest public-private partnerships of the type supported by Daley and Obama took place in the Woodlawn neighborhood, a checkerboard of battered apartment buildings and vacant lots just south of the University of Chicago.

Grove Parc Plaza opened there in 1990 as a redevelopment of an older housing complex. The buildings had a new owner and a major renovation funded by the federal government. Even the name Grove Parc Plaza was new.

The owner, a local nonprofit company called Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., was led by two of the neighborhood's most powerful ministers, Arthur Brazier and Leon Finney. Obama had relationships with both men. In 1999, he donated $500 of his campaign funds to another of their community groups, The Woodlawn Organization.

Woodlawn Preservation hired a private management firm, William Moorehead and Associates, to oversee the complex. In 2001, the company lost that contract and a contract to manage several public housing projects for allegedly failing to do its job. The company's head, William Moorehead, was subsequently convicted of embezzling almost $1 million in management fees.

Woodlawn Preservation hired a new property manager, Habitat Co. At the time, the company was headed by its founder, Daniel Levin, also a major contributor to Obama's campaigns. Valerie Jarrett was executive vice president.

Residents say the complex deteriorated under Moorehead's management and continued to decline after Habitat took over. A maintenance worker at the complex says money often wasn't even available for steel wool to plug rat holes. But as late as 2003, a routine federal inspection still gave conditions at Grove Parc a score of 82 on a 100-point scale.

When inspectors returned in 2005, they found conditions were significantly worse. Inspectors gave the complex a score of 56 and warned that improvements were necessary. They returned the following year and found things had reached a new low. Grove Parc got a score of 11 and a final warning. Three months later, inspectors found there had been insufficient improvements and moved to seize the complex from Woodlawn Preservation.

After negotiations with tenants, the government agreed to allow a new company, Preservation of Affordable Housing, a Boston-based firm, to replace Habitat as the manager of Grove Parc. The company is negotiating to buy the development, which would then be demolished and replaced with new housing.

The Woodlawn and Habitat (Jarrett) people made excuses for the disrepair. 

Officials at Woodlawn Preservation say the government didn't give them enough money to properly maintain Grove Parc. Habitat's Jarrett declined to comment on Grove Parc in particular but said it is hard to manage something you don't own.

But other Chicago developers and housing activists say federal subsidies can be adequate if managed properly. They say Grove Parc stands apart for how badly it fell into disrepair.

In other words the took the money and made the tenants live in squalor.

"Grove Parc is quite an exception to what we've normally done because it's in such bad shape," said the nonprofit's chief executive, Amy Anthony. "These complexes are often tired, they're always denser than today's philosophy, but they're not usually anywhere near as deteriorated."

Similar problems also plagued the next generation of affordable housing development in Obama's district, created as part of the Daley administration's efforts to subsidize smaller apartment buildings scattered throughout neighborhoods.

One of the largest recipients of the subsidies was Rezmar Corp., founded in 1989 by Tony Rezko, who ran a company that sold snacks at city beaches, and Daniel Mahru, who ran a company that sold ice to Rezko. Neither man had development experience.

Over the next nine years, Rezmar used more than $87 million in government grants, loans, and tax credits to renovate about 1,000 apartments in 30 Chicago buildings. Companies run by the partners also managed many of the buildings, collecting government rent subsidies.

Rezmar collected millions in development fees but fell behind on mortgage payments almost immediately. On its first project, the city government agreed to reduce the company's monthly payments from almost $3,000 to less than $500.

By the time Obama entered the state Senate in 1997, the buildings were beginning to deteriorate. In January 1997, the city sued Rezmar for failing to provide adequate heat in a South Side building in the middle of an unusually cold winter. It was one of more than two dozen housing-complaint suits filed by the city against Rezmar for violations at its properties.

People who lived in some of the Rezmar buildings say trash was not picked up and maintenance problems were ignored. Roofs leaked, windows whistled, insects moved in.

"In the winter I can feel the cold air coming through the walls and the sockets," said Anthony Frizzell, 57, who has lived for almost two decades in a Rezmar building on South Greenwood Avenue. "They didn't insulate it or nothing."

Sharee Jones, who lives in another former Rezko building one block away, said her apartment was rat-infested for years.

"You could hear them under the floor and in the walls, and they didn't do nothing about it," Jones said.

If you cannot see video below click here.

By the time Rezmar asked Chicago's city government for a loan on its final subsidized development, in 1998, the city's housing commissioner was describing the company in a memo as being in "bad shape." The Daley administration still made the $3.1 million loan.

Of course Daley gave them the cash, this was Chicago. Shortly getting the loan, Rezmar switched from subsidized housing to high-end development, using the money it had made on those subsidized housing develpoments. Rezko's companies also stopped managing the subsidized complexes.

"Affordable housing run by private companies just doesn't work," Mahru, who no longer works with Rezko, said in an interview with the Globe. "It's difficult, if not impossible, for a private company to maintain affordable housing for low-income tenants."

Responsibility for several buildings fell to the Chicago Equity Fund, which had purchased government tax credits from Rezmar to help finance the projects. After Rezko walked away, the fund was obliged to maintain the buildings as affordable housing. If it did not, it would have to repay the government for the tax credits.

The fund found the buildings in terrible condition. In a 2001 plea to the state to temporarily suspend payments on its mortgages, a fund executive wrote that heating problems, lapsed maintenance, and uncollected rent made the buildings almost impossible to manage.

Most of the buildings have since been foreclosed upon, forcing the tenants to find new housing.

All the while, Tony Rezko was forging a close friendship with Barack Obama. When Obama opened his campaign for state Senate in 1995, Rezko's companies gave Obama $2,000 on the first day of fund-raising. Save for a $500 contribution from another lawyer, Obama didn't raise another penny for six weeks. Rezko had essentially seeded the start of Obama's political career.

As Obama ascended, Rezko became one of his largest fund-raisers. And in 2005, Rezko and his wife helped the Obamas purchase the house where they now live.

Eleven of Rezmar's buildings were located in the district represented by Obama, containing 258 apartments. The building without heat in January 1997, the month Obama entered the state Senate, was in his district. So was Jones's building with rats in the walls and Frizzell's building that lacked insulation. And a redistricting after the 2000 Census added another 350 Rezmar apartments to the area represented by Obama.

But Obama has contended that he knew nothing about any problems in Rezmar's buildings.

After Rezko's assistance in Obama's home purchase became a campaign issue, at a time when the developer was awaiting trial in an unrelated bribery case, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that the deterioration of Rezmar's buildings never came to his attention. He said he would have distanced himself from Rezko if he had known.

Other local politicians say they knew of the problems.

"I started getting complaints from police officers about particular properties that turned out to be Rezko properties," said Toni Preckwinkle, a Chicago alderman.

She had previously received campaign contributions from Rezmar and said she had regarded the company as a model, one of the city's best affordable housing developers.

But in the early 2000s, she called Rezko to ask for an explanation for the declining conditions. He told her Rezmar was "getting out of the business," she said - walking away from its responsibility for managing the developments.

"I didn't see him nor have anything to do with him after that," she said.

Preckwinkle, who [was]will be an Obama delegate at the [2008] Democratic National Convention, said she would not answer any questions about Obama's role in her district, nor his relationship with Rezko.

Allison Davis left his law firm to pursue a full-time career as an affordable housing developer, funded by  subsidies from the Daley administration and aided, at times, by Obama himself.

In several cases, Davis partnered with Tony Rezko. In 1998 the two men created a limited partnership to build an apartment building for seniors on Chicago's South Side. Obama wrote letters on state Senate stationery supporting city and state loans for the project.

In 2000 Davis asked the nonprofit Woods Fund of Chicago for a $1 million investment in a new development partnership, Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners. Obama, a member of the board, voted in favor, helping Davis secure the investment.

The following year, Davis assembled another partnership to create New Evergreen/Sedgwick, a $10.7 million renovation of five walk-up buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood. The project, a model of small-scale, mixed-income development, was subsidized by almost $6 million in state loans and federal tax credits.

Conditions deteriorated quickly. Chronic plumbing failures consumed the project's financial reserves while leaving undrained sewage in some of the apartments. In October, after repeated complaints from building residents, the city government sued the owners, and a judge imposed a $5,500 fine.

Obama has distanced himself from Rezko since his conviction, but remained close to others in the development community. Jarrett is in the administration. And Obama chose another close friend, Martin Nesbitt, as his campaign treasurer. Nesbitt was the chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, one of the key overseers of the shift toward private management and development and remains and Obama golfing buddy

Now almost four years after he became President, we now understand that Barack Obama has done the same  job with the economy as he did with Grove Parc