The City of Los Angeles – you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  Slowly, ever since the departure of Mayor Richard Riordan in 2001, the parade of inept mayors and spineless city councils have dragged the city into a morass.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has always been an empty suit, a smirking, glad-handing fool of epic proportions with a history of questionable ethics.  Besides successfully lobbying President Clinton to commute the sentence of a convicted cocaine trafficker, Villaraigosa pulled a John Edwards by allegedly fooling around while his spouse was undergoing cancer treatment.  Add to this the L.A Times report that the Los Angeles Ethics Commission accused him of 31 violations of campaign finance and disclosure laws during his 2003 City Council campaign.  Toss in the report that Villaraigosa was a member of MECha, a Hispanic separatist organization, while at UCLA, and attended an unaccredited law school in Los Angeles that allegedly promoted illegal alien causes (He failed the bar exam four times).

This is the Mayor of Los Angeles, and Angelenos have gotten what they deserve.  They re-elected a man who has shown absolutely no leadership in times of crisis.  His inability to use the bully pulpit has contributed to the dismal record of the Los Angeles Unified School District.  LAUSD is falling apart, unable to manage its budget, unable to fire teachers due to outrageous union rules, and increasing class sizes.  This is not surprising.  A report by the LA Weekly, an alternative newspaper usually known for supporting left-wing causes, did some strong investigative work into Villaraigosa’s schedule.  During one period, the Mayor spent only 11% of his time working on city business.  He has refused to direct LAPD to repeal Special Order 40 – which does not permit officers from asking about someone’s immigration status.

So even in circumstances where an officer sees a KNOWN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT that he himself helped deport following a prior arrest, he cannot report this individual to I.C.E.   This outrageous policy by the Mayor and City Council resulted in the shooting death of a young man named Jamiel Shaw.

However, the most egregious lack of leadership Villaraigosa demonstrates is occurring right now.

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Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) is at the center of negotiations shaping a bill that he promises will add transparency to the complicated, furtive world of financial derivatives, but he cannot remember how much he paid for his house on 10 waterfront acres in Ireland.  No wonder confidence in government’s competence continues to erode.

Dodd’s office told me early last year that he paid $127,000 in 2002 for his co-owner’s 2/3 interest in a house on 10 waterfront acres on the island of Inishnee in a tony region of western Ireland.  The next month he told reporters at The Hartford Courant that since he’d also paid off his co-owner’s portion of their joint mortgage on the property, he really paid about $50,000 more than what he’d said.

A month after that revision, Dodd told Newsweek that he’d paid $207,000 for the 2/3 interest in the property that he’d purchased with a Kansas City real estate developer William Kessinger in 1994.  The 5 term senator provided no details on what sort of Jethro Bodine ciphering he did to get that number.

None of those figures matches the amount Dodd reported to Irish authorities when he purchased Kessinger’s interest in the property.

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