HUD corruption blooms under Bush

Nothing in the dinosaur media about this except a few articles in the Washington Post, which the rest of the media hasn't picked up on. Maybe it's because the Bush regime has had so many corruption scandals that a new scandal is hardly news.

Under Bush appointee Alphonso Jackson, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been trying to punish the Philadelphia Housing Authority because it refuses to help one of Jackson's cronies. In an e-mail exchange, 2 of Jackson's assistants discussed making the Philadelphia Housing Authority director's life "less happy" by taking away $50,000,000 in federal funding.

The Senate has been questioning Jackson about the scandal, but he's been as evasive as you'd expect from a Bush appointee.

Jackson later dismissed the threat to take away funding as just empty blustering by staffers who were frustrated by a different dispute. But he's used this excuse for stuff before. Jackson once related this story: After a HUD contract was awarded to a contractor who made a good bid, the contractor thanked Jackson but told him he wasn't a fan of Bush. Then Jackson promptly revoked the contract. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the President?" Jackson said. But when called out on the fact that he took away a contract over politics, Jackson's HUD then backpedaled and said this story was just apocryphal.

Later, however, an inspector general's report confirmed that Alphonso Jackson had indeed intervened against contractors based on politics.

The media has got to cover the current HUD scandal. But I know it won't cover it much, because most of the media is too busy trying to fix the next election to let the GOP win again. (If the Republicans win, America will have endured 32 continuous years of conservative rule come the following election. Isn't that depressing? And yes, I'm counting the Clinton years as conservative.)

(Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/15/AR2008031502048.html)