10-year sentence for ex-New Orleans Mayor Nagin

On a tip from my brother Gary

Nagin was convicted Feb. 12 of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from businessmen who wanted work from the city or Nagin's support for various projects. The bribes came in the form of money, free vacations and truckloads of free granite for his family business.

The 58-year-old Democrat had defiantly denied any wrongdoing after his 2013 indictment and during his February trial.

Until his indictment in 2013, he was perhaps best known for a widely heard radio interview in which he angrily, and sometimes profanely, asked for stepped-up federal response in the days after levee breaches flooded most of the city during Katrina.

Nagin was a political newcomer when he won election as New Orleans' mayor, succeeding Marc Morial in 2002. He cast himself as a reformer and announced crackdowns on corruption in the city's automobile-inspection and taxi-permit programs. But federal prosecutors say his own corrupt acts began during his first term, continued through the Katrina catastrophe and flourished in his second term.

He drew notoriety for impolitic remarks, such as the racially charged "New Orleans will be chocolate again" after the city's African-American population plummeted post-Katrina, and his comment that a growing violent crime problem "keeps the New Orleans brand out there."

Moments before sentencing, a subdued Nagin made a brief statement, thanking the judge for her professionalism. He made no apologies. "I trust that God's going to work all this out," he said.

After the sentencing Nagin smiled and hugged supporters as he walked out of the courtroom with his wife, Seletha, and other family members and friends.

Nagin is to report to the federal prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, in September.

Nagin was alleged to have received roughly a half million dollars.

She noted character references showing him to be a devoted son, husband and father. And she said, despite his crimes, Nagin displayed "a genuine if all too infrequent" desire to help New Orleans and its residents after the 2005 catastrophe.

Most government pre-sentence reports and recommendations were not made public but a filing by defense attorney Robert Jenkins ahead of the sentencing hearing indicated prosecutors were pushing for a sentence of 20 years or more under federal sentencing guidelines.

Jenkins said that would amount to a virtual life sentence for the former mayor. Jenkins said Nagin's family needs him, there is no danger of Nagin committing more crimes and that the crimes for which Nagin was convicted constituted an aberration from an otherwise model life.

Prosecutors said the schemes that led to Nagin's conviction included two family members: His two grown sons were never charged with a crime but they were part of the family business that received free granite from a contractor. They also said that what Jenkins calls an "aberration" was behavior that spanned six years and involved multiple contractors.

10-year sentence for ex-New Orleans Mayor Nagin

OK...we're not becoming Venezuela..

We are Venezuela!

The MSM has been in bed with Barry so long they can't find their slippers, so they  just roll over and go back to sleep, and dream about their former 1st Amendment rights. 

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MRC's Bozell Hits Media for Rolling Over, Accepting Obama Restrictions on Border Crisis Coverage

"Imagine after Katrina that reporters are getting ready to go to New Orleans, and the Bush administration says to reporters, now one thing: no recording devices, no questions, no interacting with staff or children, no photos, and no interviews, but other than that you can cover Katrina," MRC president Brent Bozell noted on this afternoon's Your World with Neil Cavuto. He observed that the media's response would be that it was "fascistic" to impose such "demands on the press." Fast forward to now with the Obama administration slapping these sort of restrictions on the media on the U.S. border with Mexico, and the press are taking it lying down rather than telling "the Obama administration to go fly a kite." 

"This is an administration that is becoming unglued.... They are reacting with panic the way the Chicago machine reacts where they're just trying to ram down the throats of the public the rules as they see fit," Bozell argued, adding "they are breaking the Constitution at every level. This seems to be the First Amendment that's threatened by these people."

"Where are the stories, other than Fox as usual... about Obama going to Texas for fundraisers but won't go to the border to visit this?" Bozell asked rhetorically, answering, "Why? Because the optics are so horrifying, with the president being amongst the squalor his administration created."

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Video 74

OK...we're not becoming Venezuela..

Can anyone imagine Barry doing this?

Can anyone imagine Barry doing this?

THE MOST VIRAL VIDEO FOR 2014

Sometimes the cold hard facts hurt. Especially for those who voted for Barry.

On a tip from Ed Kilbane

Senior National Correspondent

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Video 73

THE MOST VIRAL VIDEO FOR 2014

"Stedman's" long losing record before the Supreme Court

If Eric Holder were a baseball player, he’d have been benched long ago — if not kicked off the team. His batting average before the Supreme Court is abysmal, losing again and again in his efforts to undermine the Constitution.

This term featured four big strike downs.

First was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the Supremes tossed out ObamaCare’s contraceptive abortion mandate and upheld the First Amendment rights of several family-owned businesses to make their living in conformance with their religious beliefs.

Although the government was not party to another case, Harris v. Quinn, the Justice Department filed an amicus brief on the side of Illinois and the SEIU, arguing that unwilling home health-care workers could be forced into unions (and made to pay compulsory dues) simply because their services are paid for through Medicaid.

Fortunately, the Court ruled against Illinois’s heavy-handed attempt to help bolster its political allies, public sector unions.

On June 26, in National Labor Relations Board v. Canning, all nine Justices ruled that President Obama’s “recess” appointments to the NLRB violated the Constitution.

Not only did Obama’s own judicial appointees vote against him (including his former solicitor general), but the majority opinion was written by Stephen Breyer, a liberal stalwart of the Court.

The Administration also lost United State v. Wurie, in which the Holder Justice Department claimed that the police and federal authorities did not need a search warrant to seize all of the information stored in the cellphone of someone who had been arrested.

Once again, the administration lost all nine justices.

The basic invasion of privacy and violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches and seizures represented by the administration’s position is in line with its frightening view of governmental power over its citizens.

John Fund and Hans A. von Spakovsky co-wrote “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”

Canning and Wurie are only the latest losses of the administration in which all nine Supreme Court justices ruled against the government.

In fact, there have been 20 such cases during this administration — and even more if you include cases in which the administration filed an amicus brief, such as in McCullen v. Coakley, the free-speech case that was handed down the same day as the recess appointments case.

The Obama administration filed an amicus brief in that case supporting the Massachusetts law in question and helped argue the case before the Supreme Court.

But all nine justices found the Massachusetts law, which created a 35-foot “buffer” zone around abortion clinics, violated the First Amendment by restricting speech in public areas “that have historically been open to the public for speech activities.”

It is no surprise that the administration supported a law that restricted the voice of pro-life supporters.

That is in accord with its general attack on the political speech and activities of disfavored conservative advocacy organizations through the IRS and other government agencies.

The positions taken by this administration in the other 9-to-0 cases are just as overbroad.

In 2012’s Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, DOJ displayed an open hostility to religious freedom by claiming that the federal government had the right, as the Supreme Court termed it, to “interfere” in a church’s employment decisions on the hiring and firing of its ministers and religious teachers.

The Supreme Court was clearly astounded at the arguments being made by the Justice Department and unanimously rejected it.

In Sackett v. EPA, the administration tried to prevent a family from defending itself in court and contesting a punitive order from EPA bureaucrats imposing a fine of $75,000 a day for trying to develop a lot in a residential neighborhood which the EPA considered a wetland. The administration lost.

In US v. Jones, just like in the Riley/Wurie cases, the administration claimed that law enforcement could attach a GPS device to your car without a warrant or even any suspicion of criminal activity.

The Court unanimously rejected this position and, in a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the administration was trying to invade “privacy interests long afforded, and undoubtedly entitled to, Fourth Amendment protection.”

Typically, the Justice Department does very well before the Supreme Court. Holder has made that a losing record.

That’s because, as legal scholar Ilya Shapiro says, the administration has “relied on outlandish legal theories that pushed a constitutional interpretation of extreme federal power.”

Holder and Obama have argued that we as Americans don’t have the right to free speech, the right to privacy, the right to due process or the freedom of religion.

Thankfully, the Supreme Court has become the last defense for those who still believe in those rights.

John Fund, a columnist for National Review, and Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, are co-authors of “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department” (HarperCollins/Broadside 2014).

"Stedman's" long losing record before the Supreme Court