Obama rewards big bundlers with jobs, commissions, stimulus money, governmen

[Barry O'Bama]

Telecom executive Donald H. Gips raised a big bundle of cash to help finance his friend Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.



http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/06/15/4880/obama-rewards-big-bundlers-jobs-commissions-stimulus-money-government-contracts-and

[boutons_deux]

I'm so relieved the pure-as-snow tea baggers got a pure-as-snow bitch elected who avoids all the cronyism she ran against.


Nikki Haley's Pay-to-Play Politics

But Haley has been navigating a series of land mines—IRS disputes, questionable business deals and appointments, multiple adultery allegations—any one of which threatens to blow up her political career. “I believe she is the most corrupt person to occupy the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction,” declared John Rainey, a longtime Republican fundraiser and power broker who chaired the state’s Board of Economic Advisers for eight years. A 69-year-old attorney, Rainey is an aristocratic iconoclast who never bought the Haley myth. “I do not know of any person who ran for governor in my lifetime with as many charges against him or her as she has had that went unanswered,” he told me on a recent afternoon at his sprawling horse farm outside the small town of Camden. “The Democrats got Alvin Greene; we got Nikki Haley. Because nobody bothered to check these guys out.”

Inside the Favor Factory

When Haley took office in January, her backbencher status gave her no support structure in state government. Since then she’s appointed a surprising number of cronies and loyalists to bureaucratic functions in order to construct such a network. Many state boards have staggered terms to prevent unilateral decimation of institutional knowledge, but because former Governor Mark Sanford left so many appointees in place when their terms expired, there was a glut of personnel for Haley to dispense with as she pleased. At an early stage in the bloodbath, the capital city daily newspaper, the State, pointed out that of the fifty-nine she had already replaced, twenty-six were donors to her campaign.

Such wholesale housecleaning was not only sharply at variance with what the last GOP governor had done when taking over from a member of the same party; it also reeked of the kind of favor trading Haley had run against on the stump.

http://www.thenation.com/article/161462/nikki-haleys-pay-play-politics

[ChumpDumper]

Newsflash: patronage exists.

[ElNono]

I was looking at an ABC News report on that last night. They said the amount of bundlers he placed in top positions in the government is the highest since something like the 40's. Not to mention they had a speech from him during the campaign that was rallying people with something like "you only get to write a letter, they get full access, and we're going to change that", or some such. :lol