Of The Corrupt And Dishonet Democrat Party And The Corrupt And Dishonest Mainstream Media Propaganda That Serves Them

You want to see how to report a story without admitting the most central fact to the story?

Ex-mayor of Rosemead admits guilt in bribery case
John Tran, 36, admits to shaking down a developer for more than $10,000 while on the City Council. He also resigns from the school board and withdraws from an Assembly race.
February 04, 2012|By Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Times

A former Rosemead city official who made a run for state Assembly has agreed to plead guilty to soliciting and accepting more than $10,000 in bribes from a developer.

 John Tran, 36, an El Monte Union High School District board member and former Rosemead mayor and councilman, admitted shaking down a developer who was trying to build a mixed-use office and residential project in Rosemead while he was on the council, according to a federal plea agreement made public Friday.

The developer, who was not named in the court documents, had bought a vacant lot for $1.1 million and planned to build offices. At the request of Tran and two city employees, however, the developer agreed to buy an adjacent lot for $700,000 and build a mixed-use project.Between 2005 and 2007, while project approvals were pending, Tran would periodically visit the developer, who eventually became a confidential informant in the federal investigation, and demand money, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

During that period, the developer gave Tran $10,000 in cash payments and a check for $3,200 made out to “cash,” according to the plea agreement.

At one point, officials said, the developer asked why Tran had done nothing in exchange for the bribes, and Tran said he had done “this” — pointing to a staff report and preliminary design approval that suggested the project was moving forward in the approval process.

After August 2007, the developer refused to give any more payments to Tran, according to the agreement. In 2009, Tran was voted out of office; and the project, which became the subject of the federal investigation, never received final approval.

Before he was charged, Tran had thrown his hat in the ring for the 49th Assembly District seat being vacated by termed-out Assemblyman Mike Eng (D-Monterey Park). Tran’s attorney, Michael Zweiback, said Tran is now withdrawing his candidacy and submitted his resignation to the school board Friday.

“John understands that his elected position and public service is over,” Zweiback said. “He’s done a lot of good things for the community, and he wanted to spare his constituents and his family the pain of a long trial.”

A biography on Tran’s campaign website touts his achievements on the City Council and says that as a school board member “he has worked to establish reforms focused on rooting out corruption in the school district.”

Rosemead’s current mayor, Steven Ly, who won office in the election in which Tran lost his seat by a single vote, said that many community members had suspected Tran of pay-to-play politics before the criminal charges emerged. But Ly said the city has changed under the new council.

“I feel that we’ve done a good job of cleaning house since his period of time,” the mayor said.

A representative of a company that may have been the one involved in the federal investigation has filed a claim against the city in an attempt to recover funds taken by Tran, Ly said. The council voted last month to reject the claim. A representative of the company could not be reached for comment.

You see, what is never mentioned EVEN ONCE is that John Tran is a DEMOCRAT.

To whit:

The same omission “conveniently” occurred when the media reported on the shocking corruption case of Bell, California.  All EIGHT of the corrupt officials who took despicable advantage of their positions were DEMOCRATS.  But you’d never get the mainstream media to admit it.  At least not until the 44th paragraph buried in the bowels of the fine details.

If this guy had been a REPUBLICAN, the LA Times would have made it the first word of their story, as in “Republican John Tran is a scumbag.”

The mainstream media is pathologically dishonest and hyperpartisan in every way it possibly can be.

If you count on them for news, you will believe lies. 

And believing lies is only a degree worse than telling lies.

A Fact Media Is Hiding: All EIGHT Slimbeball Bell, Calif. Officials Are DEMOCRATS

Particularly if you live in California, you have seen repeated coverage of the incredibly despicable corruption and violation of the public trust demonstrated by politicians in Bell, California.

First, the story from Newsbusters:

Eight Dems Arrested in Bell, CA ‘Corruption on Steroids’ – Not a Single Mention of Party Affiliation From Media
By Lachlan Markay (Bio | Archive)
Tue, 09/21/2010 – 15:19 ET

Today, eight city council members were arrested in Bell, California for what Los Angeles County District Attorney labeled “corruption on steroids.” Thus far, every major news outlet that has reported on the story has omitted the fact that all eight individuals arrested are Democrats.

These glaring omissions come only weeks after NewsBusters reported that of the 351 stories on the then-brewing controversy, 350 had omitted party affiliations, and one had mentioned they were Democrats only in apologizing for not doing so sooner.

ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported on the arrests today without mentioning party affiliations.

One commenter at CNN’s online story got it spot on: “I notice there is no mention of the party affiliation of the accused. I can find no mention of it in any story on the internet. This must mean they were all Democrats.”

Give the man a cigar.

Together, the eight city officials “misappropriated” $5.5 million in municipal funds. Robert Rizzo, the chief culprit, was arrested on 53 counts of various brands of corruption.

Before the scandal came to light, Rizzo had been making roughly $1.5 million per year, even though the per capita income in Bell is roughly half the national average.

Pedro Carillo, Bell’s interim city manager, released a statement on the arrests today:

Given the sheer volume of charges levied against former Bell Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo and former Assistant CAO Angela Spaccia by the district attorney, it is clear that Rizzo and Spaccia were at the root of the cancer that has afflicted the City of Bell. Also, it is a sad day for Bell that four current and two former members of the council also have been arrested. I am prepared to double down our efforts to continue to restore order, establish good government reforms, and to ensure that Bell is providing needed services to its residents.

Despite arrests in one of the most massive cases of municipal corruption in recent memory, no media outlet could bring itself to mention the officials’ party affiliations, a fact that has been widely reported since the scandal entered the national spotlight.

There was basically ONE acknowledgment that the corrupt politicians who filched MILLIONS of dollars for themselves in the form of insanely lucrative salaries and pensions – all at the courtesy of taxpayers, of course – were all in fact DEMOCRATS.  That came from The Orange County Register.  And even then, that admission only resulted from the fact that knowledgeable readers complained about the omission:

In the wake of the Bell salary scandal, our readers noticed one part of the story has been left out by virtually all media sources, including our related editorials and columns: the political party affiliations of the five city council members who not only failed to protect city coffers, but participated in what amounts to shameless, if apparently legal, self-dealing.

All five council members are members of the Democratic Party.

Jack Abramoff wasn’t even a Republican official, but by the time the mainstream media got through with the story, there was naught an American who didn’t know that Republicans were evil as a result of their reporting of the 2005-2006 story.  And the fact that a number of prominent Democrats were involved, too, somehow got little mention, of course.

This has been going on for so long, and it’s so sickening.

On October 14, 2008 – two years ago this month – I wrote an article about another galling example of media bias and hypocrisy.  I reminisced about Mark Foley – whom the Democrats and the mainstream media turned into the poster boy of everything that was wrong with the Republican Party just in time to poison the 2006 elections against Republicans.

Now, the media could have made a similar example out of Democrat Tim Mahoney, who replaced Mark Foley in the very same West Palm Beach, Florida district.  In terms of breaking the law and being a slimeball, Mahoney did far worse than anything Foley did – and just in time to be the poster boy for Democrat malfeasance in advance of the 2008 elections.  But the same media that turned Mark Foley into a household name were nowhere to be found.

And, as I predicted, two years later and nobody knows who Tim Mahoney was anymore.

Tim Mahoney spent $121,000 of taxpayer money to keep an aide with whom he was sexually involved with from talking after she threatened to sue him.  He threatened his tax-dollar-funded mistress and said to her, “You work at my pleasure.  Do you understand what that means?”

Mahoney self-righteously claimed he would be better than Mark Foley.  He was actually the guy the Democrats tasked to lead the way in the Democrats’ ethics reform package.  And yet the mainstream media couldn’t seem to find a hitch to hang a story about the guy.

Journalists couldn’t bring themselves to harm Democrats.  Because they are partisan and biased.  And they don’t report the facts, they slant them.

There’s always a ton of stories to show how pathologically dishonest, biased and corrupt the mainstream media is.  Recently, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was fired by the network after a bizarre rant in which he demonstrated he was profoundly racist and anti-Semitic.

No wonder Obama is so favorable toward CNN; they have the same attitude toward “them Jews” that his reverend and spiritual adviser for 23 years had.  Just saying.

That Rick Sanchez racist tirade reminded me of a story I wrote about how that very same CNN anchor falsely attributed racist statements to Rush Limbaugh in a shocking act of media scapegoating:

CNN joined MSNBC in “quoting” Rush Limbaugh to effect that he is a racist.  And as a result of these “bigoted remarks,” Rush Limbaugh was thrown out of an ownership package to purchase the St. Louis Rams.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez did the following:

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez read a disputed racist quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh about antebellum slavery on Monday’s Newsroom: “Limbaugh’s perceived racist diatribes are too many to name. Here’s a sample- he once declared that ‘slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.’”

And that certainly wasn’t all that Rick Sanchez said.  Go to the link for more, and for the embedded video of the “reporting.”

You want to talk about the racist calling the kettle “racist”?

Rush Limbaugh never said any of the things that Rick Sanchez claimed.  It was a terrible, biased, ideological, serial slandering by someone who professed himself to be an “objective journalist.”

I want you to understand.  Clearly, Rick Sanchez didn’t go after Rush Limbaugh because Rush Limbaugh is racist.  It’s RICK who is racist, not RUSH.  No, Rick Sanchez targeted Rush Limbaugh because, like most of his fellow “journalists,” Rick Sanchez is a partisan, biased, ideologue propagandist.

If the media were to report the facts fairly, accurately and honestly, the Republicans would have dominated the political landscape since FDR nearly destroyed America with the same policies that Obama is using to destroy the country today.

Prior to Obama’s being elected president, the “story” was all about how Republicans had exploded the economy.  So it should come as no surprise that 57.4% of Obama voters were unaware of the fact that DEMOCRATS had been in control of Congress for the preceding two years.  It didn’t make any sense how the Republicans could be entirely to blame for the economy collapsing if it was actually DEMOCRATS who controlled both the House of Representatives and the US Senate.  So we had one of those cases in which “if the facts got in the way of the reporting, so much the worse for the facts.”

In 2006, and again in 2008, Democrats – with the help of the mainstream media – made Republican corruption a primary issue.

Now we’ve got more corrupt Democrats than you can shake a stick at (e.g., Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, John Kerry, all the many Obama officials who failed to pay their taxes – particularly the Treasury Secretary and top tax enforcer Timothy Geithner – and basically the entire Democrat establishment).  Not to mention the eight incredibly sleezy Democrat officials from Bell, California, who are robbing poor citizens who earn only half the national average blind.

And those eight Bell, California Democrats are basically using the same “pension enhancement” techniques that their fellow liberal public officials in the public employee unions have relied upon to rack up some $3.35 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities.

Which is to say that Democrats have been accusing Republicans of corruption, even as they were out literally bankrupting America with their own corruption.