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Wait, what? How could this happen? The New York Times of all places ran a top-of-fold story this morning headlined, “How California Became a New Center of Political Corruption. Just wait, it gets much, much better. Or worse, depending on where you live.




The sordid story begins right where you would expect: the mandate-happy Los Angeles City Commission. Commissioner Jose Huizar, 55, who was born in Mexico, educated at Berkeley, Princeton, and UCLA law school, was nicknamed the “King Kong” of LA City Hall. (No, it’s not racist, since he’s Mexican-American.)

Jose controlled the vastly influential Planning and Land Use Management Committee, which approves or denies major real-estate developments across the mega-city. Go big, or go home! Huizar went big:

His spectacular fall • after F.B.I. agents caught him accepting $1.8
million worth of casino chips, luxury hotel stays, a liquor box full of
cash and prostitutes from Chinese developers was cast by
federal prosecutors as an epic Hollywood tale. They persuaded a
judge in January to sentence him to 13 years in prison on charges
of tax evasion and racketeering.

King Kong Huizar became the third LA City Councilman to be convicted of corruption charges in the last year. A fourth still faces charges. The Times said those four were only part of “a much larger circle of staff aides, fund-raisers, political consultants and real estate developers charged in an extraordinary recent wave of bribery and influence-peddling across California.”

Extraordinary!

Actually, not that extraordinary. It’s kind of ordinary. According to Justice Department reports, during the last 10 years, a whopping 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, more than New York, New Jersey, and Illinois put together. This explains a lot.

Even more shocking, the Times blamed the corruption superspreader, in part, on —get this— the growing Democrat super-majority:

A heavy concentration of power at Los Angeles City Hall, the
receding presence of local news media, a population that often
tunes out local politics and a growing Democratic supermajority in
state government have all helped insulate officeholders from
damage, political analysts said.

For Jose’s part, when asking the judge for leniency, Huizar admitted being a bribe-factory, but he was just a poor public servant twisted into a greedy pretzel by crooked bribers:

Now scheduled to surrender to prison by Aug. 31, Mr. Huizar made
a public apology at his sentencing hearing, saying he had long been
dedicated to his community. "Shiny things were dangled in front of
me, and I could not resist the temptation," he said in a letter to the
judge asking for leniency. "The money, the fancy dinners, luxury
flights. It was there for the taking, and I could not say no."

Apparently, neither Princeton or Berkeley, nor even UCLA law school, prepared King Kong to resist the shiny temptations dangled before him like whatshername, Fay Wray.

California suffers from a complicated corruption problem; coincidentally, it also suffers from a Democrat problem:

But political analysts say the Democrats' present lock on political
power leaves little opportunity for Republicans to effectively raise
the issue of corruption as a campaign issue.
"When a political party enjoys that much uncontested power,
there's no penalty for stepping over ethical or legal lines," said Dan
Schnur, a former head of the state Fair Political Practices
Commission and a former Republican who is now an independent.

It must be pretty bad when things are bad enough for the New York Times to report about bad Democrat behavior. Well, California voters? What are you going to do about it?

More than anything, Los Angeles is also the hub of Harris’s current fundraising campaign. Of six trips including Los Angeles stops so far this year, every single one included a campaign event. I’m just saying that Los Angeles seems flush with cash for Democrat political campaigns.

The Journal noted that Kamala, as you might expect, regularly helps local L.A. officials with their own campaigns. Only the honest ones, probably.

Now don’t get carried away. I’m not connecting the New York Times corruption story to the Journal’s story about Kamala’s favorite city. I’m just noticing the peculiar confluence of information.

Our last story is heaped with hope for future generations. Yesterday, the San Diego Union Tribune ran a super encouraging citizen-journalist story headlined, “Two San Diego teens investigated their high school foundation’s finances. Then one got called in to the principal.” The sub-headline skeptically added, “The school principal and foundation blasted the report as untrue but didn't identify anything specifically wrong in the students' findings.”




Alert student Kevin Wang, 17, a Canyon Crest High School senior, became annoyed after twenty-five percent of his robotics club’s fund-raising was ‘taxed’ to the school’s foundation. Even worse, at the end of each school year, the foundation further taxed the club thirty-four percent of its total annual revenue.

So Kevin and his classmate Litong Tian, 17, decided to question authority. The duo dug through public records, including the foundation’s Forms 990 disclosures, combed its annual audited financial statements, reviewed its website and bylaws, as flyspecked robotics club’s financial spreadsheets. The pair interviewed Canyon Crest students and coaches, and compared everything to other schools in the school district.

“What I found was, like, really shocking, and it just kept building up,” Kevin concluded.

Last week, the two sleuthing students published their results in a 15-page report, on a website titled “Ravens for Transparency.” Among other things, they found that the so-called charitable foundation failed to disclose its executive director salaries —required by law— and buried substantial costs ($3.5 million over 12 years) in a murky “other expenses” category.

According to Kevin’s report, for some unknown reason, administrative expenses for his school’s foundation run over twice as high as all other schools in the district. And they also found a former foundation president who agreed with them:

CCAF's Former President
A former president of the CCA Foundation's board contacted us by email to express her support for
our original report. She criticized the principal's response to our criticisms, and also alleged that the
former Executive Director ignored concerns and campaigned to remove members of the Foundation
who disagreed with her.

In their rebuttal to the foundation’s hyperbolic objections, the students described a recent school board meeting, in which nearly all parent commenters supported their work and requested reforms—except for one deranged parent who called them ‘fascists.’

For the record, Kevin and Litong deny being fascists.

These so-called charitable tax-exempt organizations, like all the D.E.I. NGO’s and the ‘get out the vote’ groups, are where you find all the graft and corruption these days. I believe that government should be banned from giving grants to nonprofits. Let taxpayers donate to nonprofits voluntarily, if they like what the nonprofits are doing.

The George Soros-funded leftist propaganda outlet Media Matters is reportedly moving to buy Alex Jones’s InfoWars.

The courts recently ordered a forced sell-off of InfoWars to pay off huge legal debts after Jones and his outlet were thrashed with waves of lawsuits.

A Texas judge ruled the outlet could be liquidated to pay the families of the victims of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Texas and Connecticut courts ruled that Jones must pay the families $1.5 billion in damages for reporting on theories that the shooting was staged.

I still don't understand why Jones is being fined anything at all. Do we have free speech or don't we?