The Democratic candidates for Governor may be too cowed to criticize the opponent with the power to prosecute them, but Jonathan Saidel has set the bar for fortitude among candidates for Lieutenant Governor.
"If Attorney General Tom Corbett was on trial for politicizing the office that the people of Pennsylvania entrusted him to hold, he would be looking a guilty verdict square in the eye," Saidel said. "Attorney General Corbett had the opportunity to boldly show his non-partisan credentials by taking up the case against Senator Orie, a high profile Republican leader from his home county. Instead, he did nothing to give us faith in his impartiality."
While many have called for Corbett to resign to avoid a conflict of interest, Saidel is among the first to acknowledge that it's too late or that. The Orie scandal is a "partisan outrage,"
Conflict of interest is no longer something we can call on Corbett to avoid; he's waist-deep in it and sinking fast.
"It is clear that he cannot keep partisan political considerations from influencing the serious work the Attorney General has to do for the people of our Commonwealth," Saidel said.
"The statue of Lady Justice in Tom Corbett’s office is only blind in one eye.
On Page 30 of the Jane Clara Orie Grand Jury Indictment Findings, there is Footnote saying:
ReplyDelete“A 2004 Email from Orie to Kim Ward where Orie personally committed “volunteers” to make 250 calls on behalf of George W. Bush was presented before the Grand Jury."
CAN SOMEONE COME FORWARD ON BEING ORDERED TO WORK ON STATE TIME FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH CAMPAIGN, PLEASE CALL 717-787-3391 ATTORNEY GENERAL OFFICE, OR 412-350-4400 ALLEGHENY COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY OFFICE, 724-830-3949 WESTMORELAND COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY OFFICE, OR 412-432-4000 OR FBI PUBLIC CORRUPTION UNIT?
FBI Public Corruption/Civil Rights Hotline: (412) 432-4122 Reporting Crime
You can report suspicious activities and crime by contacting us using the information below. You can also submit a tip electronically. See When to Contact the FBI for more information.
Every District Attorney in Every 67 Pennsylvania Counties Should Now Begin Investigations Into Every Republican and Democratic Senate and House Member and State, Federal and County Officials And Federal, State, and County Judges And Former Officials.
ReplyDeleteSince Tom Corbett Will No Longer Do His Job As Proved By The Orie Refusal to Investigate!
A Grand Jury Should Be Established In Every County In Our State And People Brought Forth On Being Asked What They Saw As For Campaigning On Federal, State, Or County Time, From Signing Petitions At Local Courthouses To Working Presidential Phone Banks, To Working On Judges Campaigns, To Raising Funds On State Or Federal Time.
Dauphin County District Attorney Should Call A Grand Jury To Investigate Attorney General Tom Corbett Political Activity On State Time As Alleged By Stetler Motion!
If Stetler, Ramaley, Veon, DeWeese, and Orie were investigated, then every other elected official should be investigated including Tom Corbett to prove they never committed crimes of using state, federal or county resources to become elected.
It is Important we investigate now, hold them responsible, and have them and their campaign funds pay for the costs if found guilty. If we are going to be honest, fair, and forthright about these investigations, then those conducting them should come first, to establish their integrity above reproach.
If not Citizen Grand Jury should be filed in every county demanding a Grand Jury before every court and see how the Judges rule?
LETS CLEAN PENNSYLVANIA UP ONCE AND FOR ALL WE CANNOT HAVE THESE SAME OFFICIALS CONDUCTING A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION!
WE NEED A CITIZENS TAR AND FEATHER CAMPAIGN HOTLINE ASKING FOR INTERNS AND EMPLOYEES AND CONSULTANT TO TURN IN EACH ELECTED OFFICIAL THAT CAMPAIGN ON GOVERNMENT TIME!
AFTER ALL THIS WHAT ATTORNEY GENERAL CORBETT WEBSITES ASK FOR AND LETS GIVE IT TO ALL DISTRICT ATTORNEYS AND US ATTORNEYS TOO!
TEA BAGGERS UNITE FOR A GRAND OLD FIGHT NOW!
RALPH NADER WHERE ARE YOU?
CITIZENS RIGHTS TO FILE CRIMINAL COMPLAINTS UNDER PENNSYLVANIA LAW:
ReplyDeletePrivate Complaint Filed:
If the police decline to file a complaint, a private person is permitted to file a private complaint.
However, an Assistant District Attorney must first approve the private complaint before it can proceed.
Once approved, the process is the same as if the complaint had been filed by a police officer.
THE MEDIA CAN BE MADE AWARE OF EVERY COMPLAINT FILES AND FOLLOW ITS DISPOSITION:
Stetler Attorney should file a Private Complaint with Dauphin County District Attorney.
ReplyDeleteTom Corbett has refused to answer Stetlers Motion asking Judge Lewis to dismiss it instead of answering it, as order within 2 weeks.
Jonathan Saidel has got it right, citizens unite, and start filing your complaints since Attorney general Corbett office will not investigate the one he likes, and only goes after the ones he dislikes.
This is not right, citizens must unite, and all candidates for Governor should submit in writing that they never ordered or saw their employees working on government time while pursuing higher office for these candidates under penalties of law.
This should be submitted at the next debate and see what candidate signs and does not sign it!
Let’s see what Corbett does then, and Onorato, and Wagner, and Rohers, and Hoffel etc etc etc
The same for every Federal and State Senator, Congressperson, State Representativ, County Candidate, and Judge!
Why hang a few when we can catch all?
Holy Cow! Looks like Tommy started something that will finish him!!!! What a fun perp walk that will be!!!
ReplyDeleteThese are excellent points; government in Pennsylvania could come to a halt because of Corbett Hypocrisy and it is time to call on Tom Corbett to become decent and realize the vastness of what has happen.
ReplyDeleteIt is also a chance for Tom Corbett to help in the reforms to correct the problems statewide.
We need an Amnesty Legislative Hearing, and have everyone turn themselves in before their interns or employees do it.
Bring all forth talk about, pledge never to do it again, pay a fine, and have immunity from prosecutions.
Set up new procedures that has safeguards and a way to admit if a future violation happens without penalty unless intentional and repeated pattern or practice.
The best reform can be mostly using Public Websites that monitor Elected Officials and Employee Pay, Comp Time, Expenses, and Activities for anyone to see.
Vacate all convictions and guilty pleas, payback the bonuses, expenses, and a fine.
Drop all current investigations and upcoming trials; let the Amnesty Legislative Hearing be public for the Voters to decide later in elections on what they heard.
Reform the Pennsylvania Grand Jury System from Prosecutors abuses with added exculpatory safeguards.
Establish the Attorney General to go back to being appointed but not from the Governor but from the other opposite of the Governor's Party with a lifetime ban on any appointed Attorney General running for Governor, Senate or Congress so he can do his job honestly without political ambitions!
Call them THE CORBETT REFORMS in his honor!
In this way, each elected official that made mistakes or developed sloppy practices has a chance to admit it, be free to defend himself or herself, and explain it to the voters without fear of prosecution.
The voters will decide the elected official’s fate, and all office scan reorganize the employees needed and not needed since campaigning will no longer be part of Public Service.
The excess employees can be transferred to Democratic and Republican Campaign Offices funded by Contributors to the Party to work on the Campaigns as the Party see fit, but on Political Party dime, not government treasury.
These offices should be next to the Capitol for all Lawmakers to walk over the street and do what they need to do on campaigning.
It is not fair and it is immoral what is happening to a few when now the public knows everyone was doing it.
This is the right way to handle this scandal now.
If not, drips and drabs, of accusations will lead to more investigations, and it is time to reform, the process with organizational common sense approaches, not selective power grab career executions and political persecution, and selective prosecution.
Why be mean when all can come clean?
Or this is going to hound and halt Pennsylvania Government for years.
"It's a pattern of arrogance," Senior Deputy Attorney General E. Marc Costanzo said in an interview during the trial.
ReplyDelete"They are there because taxpayers put them there. They think they can do whatever they want, and they're fast and loose with the taxpayers' money."
“The True Hypocrite Is The One Who Ceases To Perceive His Deception, The One Who Lies With Sincerity”
~Andre Gide
"Whatever You Condemn, You Have Done Yourself."
~Georg Groddeck, The Book of the It, 1950
HHHMMNNNN....SOUNDS A BIT OVER THE TOP DOES IT NOT?????
So, Senior Deputy Attorney General E. Marc Costanzo why not defend Tom Corbett Misconduct as order by the Judge and answer Stetler's Allegations, instead of asking them to be dismissed?
What do you fear?
What are you trying to hide from your own ignorance or arrogance?
Should you not turn yourself in for wasting tax dollars are 117 bogus counts you could not prove?
Should you not turn yourself in in breaking Pennsylvania Disciplinary Code Rules on your Foul-Language that certainly your wife or children or priest cannot be proud of your filthy behavior at the Grand Jury?
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/state/s_675606.html
Anonymous 7:59 AM...It seems Brad Bumsted has helped your argument a tad this morning and your solution is not a bad one if true justice is to prevail, accountability is achieved, new internet reforms put in place, state treasury coffers reimbursed, poor wasteful state prosecutions are halted for a higher cause, and especially letting all the people to decide on election day.
ReplyDeleteSome Excerpts:
Pa. Legislative Corruption 'Pattern Of Arrogance'
By Brad Bumsted
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, April 9, 2010
Last updated: 7:30 am
HARRISBURG -- A Republican lawmaker's criminal conviction almost five years ago for campaigning with state workers and resources should have served as warning to other legislators, but cases filed by federal, state and county prosecutors since then suggests neither Democrats nor Republicans heard the alarm.
"It appears there is something of a tradition, or culture, of accepting this kind of behavior in the Legislature of having staff do political work," said Thomas Baldino, a political science professor at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre.
Using staff to do campaign work has "evolved into sort of an institutional culture," said Vincent Carocci, former press secretary to the late Democratic Gov. Robert P. Casey.
"I don't believe for a moment they haven't been doing some campaigning out of (legislative offices) for decades," said G. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Franklin & Marshall College. But that activity in the past was sporadic and often minimal, Madonna said.
"It's much more blatant, and much more direct," said Carocci.
The use of legislative staff for campaign work began to grow with expanded power of leadership in the 1990s, said Madonna. But most of the Legislature's about 2,900 employees are professionals and not campaign operatives, he said.
Elected officials "have a dual function: governing, and getting elected," said Mark Schwartz, a former aide to the late House Speaker K. Leroy Irvis of Oakland. "It's inevitable that political work and government work will intersect."
Saying others are engaged in the activity -- as Veon's attorneys argued -- doesn't wash, said Jerry Shuster, a professor of political communication and rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh.
"It is probably the worst rationale anyone could use. It's denigrating and insulting to the electorate," Shuster said.
PLEASE FOR THE SAKE OF HUMANITY AND SEEKING TRUE REFORMS, LETS COME TOGETHER AND STOP THESE PATTERNS AND PRACTICES ONCE AND FOR ALL WITH REFORMS THE INTERNET CAN BRING AND LET THE ELECTORATE DECIDE AFTER AMNESTY LEGISLATIVE HEARINGS FOR REAL REFORM LIKE THE OTHER POSTER PROPOSED.
Very Disappointed with Jane Orie right now.
ReplyDeleteThe Jane Orie indictment is very disappointing.
She is a Republican that I have always voted for and supported.
She spoke about cleaning up the Capitol but looks like her and other Republicans were hiding their own guilt of crimes by blaming just Democrats.
Before she was elected to leadership in the State Senate she always stood up for social issues that I felt other Republicans ignored.
Now I am questioning if Tom Corbett is hiding his own guilt too by attacking others.
While I believe indictments like these are sensationalized by the press and even the prosecutors, it is hard to ignore the number of staff members that spoke about the political pressure that Jane Orie put on her staff from the top down to the grand jury.
No doubt there will be a Democratic Candidate that mounts a write-in campaign?
Nevertheless, Corbett should come out with more charges on Republican and Democratic Senators if he is expected to be believed that he is conducting an honest investigation before the elections.
If not, he I will be disappointed in him.
Something else needs to be calculated that's very important: what's happening in state legislatures this coming year.
ReplyDeleteThe balance in the states will affect how the results of the 2010 census are translated into newly defined districts -- i.e., how the gerrymandering is done.
The state legislatures that're in office in 2011 will do the dirty work.
The Curious Case Of The Seal That Doesn't Bark
ReplyDeleteThe stakes and participants of the Orie-Zappala War create intense pressures, sufficient to warp customary processes and decisions in many circumstances, such as this one.
Good luck to the Post-Gazette (and any other civic-minded publishers) in attempting to
(1) persuade Pennsylvania's courts to restore normalcy to the litigation front and
(2) drafting a series of those tricky 'this is the way it usually happens, but this is the way it is occurring in this case' stories in the meantime.
Could Mike Turzai be vulnerable to losing his election or being investigated?
ReplyDeleteRepublican Mike Turzai has had a Democratic opponent in the past few elections, which he has flicked away like an annoying mosquito.
Why would he not only waste his time by challenging the signatures of his next Democratic victim, Dr. Sharon Brown, but enlist one of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s buddies to do it?
Dave Malone, one of Mayor Luke’s biggest fundraisers, is challenging Dr. Sharon Brown’s signatures.
I am not even sure why someone like Dave Malone would bother getting involved in this.
None of the people involved seem to have anything to gain.
The challenge will also give Dr. Brown some much-needed publicity that she would have never gotten otherwise.
Now she can claim that Mike Turzai is so scared of her that he felt the need to get a prominent Democrat to challenge her signatures.
The whole challenge makes little sense unless…Could Mike Turzai be vulnerable this time around?
Here are a few reasons why I am wondering:
There is a huge anti-incumbency feeling out there.
He is a career politician that could be a poster-boy for term limits.
He is Pennsylvania’s version of a “Just say No” Republican at a time when a backlash from “Just say No” might be starting.
Many disillusioned Jason Altmire supporters will have some time on their hands, and would love to help knock Mike Turzai off with a grassroots effort that knocked off Melissa Hart twice.
I have met his Democratic opponent, Dr. Sharon Brown.
She is everything he is not.
She is very likeable, intelligent, hard working and honest.
She has little interest in a career in politics.
Four years ago, no one heard of Jason Altmire as he set out to defeat a Melissa Hart that thought she was unbeatable and acted like it.
Could it happen to Mike Turzai this year?
Now that Jane Orie has been captured campaigning on state time, why has Turzai been so quiet, as a lamb.
Maybe he has some Staffers that are not Corbett Clean!
Now is there any question why Tom Corbett should drop out of the governor’s race ASAP?
ReplyDeleteI mean come on, was he really going to step on the feet of his western Pa. GOP backers? No way. This current AG is so partisan there’s no way he should be running for gov. of this state.
It’s an absolute travesty of his office that he didn’t look into all the details and instead was handled by a county DA.
And now for the attorney for the accused state senator (her brother none-the-less) to use the term “Mafia Hit,” does he really think we are that stupid?
We need a fresh start in Pa. politics, a much needed constitutional convention and quickly, but without Tom Corbett's bias, blindness, and ignorance.
Lets see Corbett had over 3 years to focus on the caucus offices and staff, and the individual Senate offices and district offices.
ReplyDeleteCorbett has over 800 employees and
there are just 50 Senators and 203 Reps.
Yet, instead of calling them all in and asking them to turn over information, he only had time to look at 5 Reps.
What happen to the AG Corbett responsibility to investigate all tips brought to his office.
Corbett declined to do so in this case, so the office intern went to the county DA instead, upon a Receptionists Recommendation?
Again, would Corbett step on western Pa. GOP toes?
No way in a year he was running for governor.
He should drop his bid for the gov. seat immediately.
It’s the right thing to do.
Staying in the race is an insult to every taxpayer in the Commonwealth.