The ousted state official who abused public resources to campaign for President Obama and illegally access confidential information to retaliate against “Joe the Plumber” has scored a lucrative government job that pays her more than the last one.

Her criminal behavior got her booted from her previous taxpayer-financed position, but Helen Jones-Kelley has bounced back in the public sector with a sweet gig that will pay her six figures. In 2008 Jones-Kelley was forced out as director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services for searching state computer files to dig up dirt on a small-business employee who publicly criticized Obama’s plan to redistribute wealth.

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known as "Joe the Plumber," was throwing a football with his son in the front yard of his home when Obama’s campaign entourage strolled through the neighborhood. Wurzelbacher questioned Obama’s tax proposals on small businesses and Obama countered that spreading the wealth is good for everybody. The exchange earned worldwide media attention and “Joe the Plumber” became an overnight sensation.

In a quest to discredit the popular figure, Jones-Kelley and two other high-ranking employees at her state agency violated Wurzelbacher’s constitutional rights by illegally accessing confidential information from its official databases. An Ohio Inspector General investigation determined that the searches constituted a “wrongful act” and that Jones-Kelley misused state resources to conduct political activities on behalf of Obama.

The private data on Wurzelbacher included information on child support, whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes. Jones-Kelley, who had been appointed by Ohio’s Democratic governor, insisted that the checks were "well-meaning," but simply misinterpreted during the final stretch of a tempestuous presidential election.

Judicial Watch filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Wurzelbacher but a federal judge in Ohio dismissed it in August, essentially ruling that government officials are free to rifle through citizens’ private files without fear of being held accountable in court. Judicial Watch is appealing because Ohio state officials clearly violated Wurzelbacher’s constitutional rights by illegally accessing confidential information from its official files.

While the case plays out in court, the public official who orchestrated the scandal will be rewarded for her unscrupulous behavior with a $145,000-a-year salary. Jones-Kelley’s new title is head of the Montgomery County Drug Addiction & Mental Health Services Board. The board’s vice chairman is satisfied that Jones-Kelley has acknowledged “mistakes were made.” Besides, he says, the so-called “mistakes” were a small part of her professional career and his agency needs to take advantage of the strengths she brings to the position.

A radical Muslim cleric banned from two different countries snuck into the United States through Mexico, affirming several reports that Middle Eastern terrorists regularly enter the country through the porous southern border.

The Tunisian imam (Said Jaziri), who has an international criminal past, paid $5,000 to get smuggled across the border near San Diego, according to a local newspaper that says it all went down just a few weeks ago. Jaziri only got caught because firefighters in the area tipped off the U.S. Border Patrol after they saw him and a Mexican man get into a car trunk in a renowned smuggling pickup area.

A Tijuana-based smuggling cartel had escorted Jaziri and a Mexican illegal immigrant over the border fence near Tecate, according to authorities cited in the story. Once on the U.S. side, they walked in the night to a spot where drivers routinely pick illegal aliens up for smuggling runs into San Diego. Jaziri evidently told authorities that he flew from Africa to Europe then to Central America and Chetumal, Mexico where he took a bus to Tijuana.

Jaziri was deported from Canada a few years ago and from France sometime in the 1990s, after serving a prison sentence for participating in a fundamentalist attack on a person who was accused of closing down a prayer room. Jaziri once led the largest mosque in Montreal, where he advocated Islamic law, known as Sharia. A few years ago he called for the death of a Danish cartoonist that drew pictures of the prophet Mohammed.

Incredibly, a growing number of Islamic extremists like Jaziri are slipping into the U.S. through Mexico. Just a few months ago a veteran federal agent announced that The U.S. Border Patrol has captured thousands of people who have been classified as OTM (Other Than Mexican) along the 2,000-mile southern border and many are from terrorist nations like Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan. The feds call them SIAs (Special Interest Aliens) and the government doesn’t want Americans to know about them.

This has been going on for some time. In fact, in 2007 the top Homeland Security official in Texas confirmed that terrorists with ties to Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda had been arrested crossing into the state through the Mexican border. A few years ago the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) revealed details of how Islamic terrorists and violent Mexican drug gangs have long teamed up to successfully penetrate the U.S. as well as finance terror networks in the Middle East.

Thanks to a notably corrupt first couple today is a shameful day in political history, she barely escaping perjury charges after lying to a federal grand jury and he publicly denying a scandalous affair with a White House intern.

Who else could it be if not Bill and Hillary Clinton? On this day in 1996 the nation’s current Secretary of State lied to a grand jury about obstructing justice to cover up an illegal real estate scam known as Whitewater. Orchestrated by Hillary’s Rose Law Firm, the shady Arkansas land scheme essentially bilked the uneducated and elderly.

Fifteen years ago Hillary reluctantly spent more than four hours testifying before a federal grand jury investigating how her husband’s White House obstructed justice on her behalf. It marked the first time in history that a First Lady of the United States had been subpoenaed before a grand jury and the only time a First Lady has been subject to a criminal investigation.

Turns out the White House “mistakenly overlooked” a trove of incriminating Whitewater records that had been subpoenaed years earlier, but Hillary had no role in the fiasco. We know that because she signed an affidavit to Senate Whitewater investigators stating that she “does not know” how her Rose Law Firm billing records ended up in the White House. The mystery has never been solved.

Bill Clinton offered an equally laughable explanation for the lost and found records on national television: “I just would like to ask the American people to take a deep breath, relax, and listen to the First Lady's answers, because we've been through this for over four years now, and every time a set of questions comes up, we answer the questions, and we go on, the American people are satisfied, and they will be again.”

Speaking of Bill, on this day in 1998 he delivered his most memorable line as commander-in-chief of the United States: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Pointing his index finger at television cameras, Bill confidently made the statement after the scandal broke that he was having an extramarital affair with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

Members of President George W. Bush’s cabinet illegally used public funds to engage in political activities and lied to cover it up, according to a lengthy report published by the independent federal agency that investigates and prosecutes government wrongdoing.

It marks the latest of many examples illustrating that government corruption is a bipartisan epidemic in which the offenders rarely get punished. At least half a dozen Bush cabinet secretaries took taxpayer-financed trips to participate in electioneering, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) determined after a three-year investigation. To cover it up, aides falsely claimed they were traveling on official business.

Instead they made more than 100 appearances in 2005 and 2006 to help congressional allies get reelected in key battleground states such as Ohio, Kentucky, Connecticut, Indiana and New Mexico. The federally funded travel was, not only approved but also organized and monitored, by the Bush White House.

Taken by the secretaries of education, agriculture, energy and health among others, the trips illegally diverted public funds and workers’ time because they violate a 1939 law (Hatch Act) that prohibits federal employees from participating in partisan political activities. Among them were visits by Veterans Administration Secretary James Nicholson to the Ohio and Washington districts of Republican congressional candidates and trips by Transportation Secretary Maria Cino and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to the Connecticut and Arizona districts of two other congressmen.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman also racked up a $30,000 tab by using Department of Defense (DOD) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) aircraft to attend six events with Republican incumbents considered top priorities by the White House.

The OSC also determined that between 2001 and 2007 the Bush White House organized numerous political rallies during work hours at nearly two dozen agencies and attendance by top political appointees was mandatory. Investigators sorted through more than 100,000 pages of documentary evidence and interviewed more than 80 Bush political appointees.

Incredibly, neither the OSC nor the Justice Department seems to have any plans to actually punish the offenders in this scandal. Perhaps the OSC’s verbose report, with exhausting paragraphs and detailed graphs and charts, can at least be put to use as a pooper scooper.

A few months after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared drug-related violence in Mexico to an insurgency, she’s praising the country for battling the cartels even though bloodshed remains at an all-time high.

The amusing about-face comes amid record levels of drug violence and just days after seven people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez, where the situation is so serious that bullets from shootouts among rival smugglers regularly spill into the U.S. In last week’s incident, drug lords used assault weapons to spray gunfire on a public soccer field.

In the meantime, Uncle Sam has showered Mexico with more than $1 billion to combat serious crime associated with illicit narcotics operations, which incidentally hit record levels in scale and brutality in 2010. More than 13,000 people were murdered across Mexico in disturbing and cruel ways not commonly seen in previous years while the U.S. keeps sending cash to deal with the issue.

Never the less, Clinton assures that “we are seeing real results on both sides of the border.” During a brief jaunt to Mexico this week, Madame Secretary commended our southern neighbor for combating the drug cartels and called Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s leadership “very courageous.” That “courageous” leadership is one of the reasons why we are making some important gains, according to Clinton, who failed to offer any concrete examples.

After all, Clinton told her Mexican counterpart (Patricia Espinosa) that “we are part of the same family, we share the same land as our common home and our children will inherit a common future.” The contributions that Mexicans have made are a “fundamental part of the fabric of the United Sates,” Clinton said during the schmooze fest in Guanajuato this week.

Sounds like Clinton was making amends for rattling Mexican officials by comparing the country’s drug cartels to a Colombia-style insurgency that devastated that South American nation a few decades ago. Offended Mexican government officials rejected the notion, claiming that the only similarities are a high demand for drugs in the U.S.

It seemed as if the day would never come, but U.S. lawmakers are finally working to slash the billions of taxpayer dollars sent annually to the famously corrupt and severely managed United Nations.

As the U.N.’s top donor, Uncle Sam has for years provided a huge chunk of its operating budget and funded many of its laughable, multi million-dollar "peacekeeping” and “human rights” projects. Just last year the U.S. gave the scandal-plagued world body $517 million for its “operating budget” and $2.68 billion for peacekeeping, more than any other nation.

The cash has poured in over the years despite rampant fraud and abuse within the organization that was founded six decades ago to supposedly maintain international peace and security. Several high-ranking U.N. officials have been criminally convicted for bribery and fraud and more than a dozen others have been exposed for soliciting bribes and rigging bids in the last few years alone.

Among the biggest U.N. scandals is the $64 billion oil-for-food program that allowed Iraq to sell oil through the U.N. so that the proceeds could be used to purchase "humanitarian" goods for the Iraqi people. Instead, thousands of companies paid Saddam Hussein illegal surcharges and kickbacks as U.N. officials stood by.

The U.N.’s so-called Human Rights Council (HRC) is also a huge joke since its best known for the oppressive regimes that comprise it. Among them are the world’s worst human rights violators, including Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China and Russia.

No wonder the new head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Florida’s Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, says funding the HRC is a waste of taxpayer dollars. A few weeks ago she referred to the U.N. as a monster and beast, which is why she’s leading the effort to slash its funding. Her committee will hold a hearing today to begin the process, which the veteran lawmaker hopes will ensure that “U.S. taxpayer dollars are being well-spent" and “advancing our nation’s interests.”

Predicting that the gravy train is about to end for the U.N., one national newspaper asks what the U.S. gets in return for the billions it pays to an ever-more bloated, corrupt, insolent bureaucracy carrying on as it always has, stuck in an entitlement mentality.

Local chapters of a powerful national union that spent nearly $30 million to help President Obama get elected are among the fortunate few to get waivers from inconvenient provisions of the contentious healthcare law.

The information, revealed today by a conservative news site, comes a week after this blog reported that a disproportionately high number of Obamacare waivers are being granted to the president’s allies in a secretive process. Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have issued more than 200 exemptions—mostly to the president’s financial supporters—from some of the more burdensome provisions of the healthcare reform law.

In early October Judicial Watch filed a public records request to obtain information on the shady deals, but the Obama Health Department flipped the finger and Judicial Watch was forced to sue. The agency blew off its legally required deadline to produce the records without providing any sort of justification for withholding them, a common occurrence when the government wants to keep damaging information from the public.

Though the process has been kept from the public, the list of exemptions is quite revealing. For instance, over a third of the more than 1.5 million employees covered by the waivers are union members even though unionized workers make up only 7% of the private workforce. Forty three union organizations have been granted Obamacare waivers so far and the number is expected to grow.

They include three local chapters of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which spent $28 million to support Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, according to a union document linked in the news story. Of interesting note is that one of the SEIU chapters—Local 25—is in Obama’s hometown of Chicago and also supported his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign. In 2008, the national union endorsed Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Nationally, the politically-connected SEIU has 2.2 million members that include security guards, healthcare workers and janitors. The waivers allow various union health insurance plans to limit the amount they’ll spend on a policy holder’s annual medical coverage, even though Obamacare eliminates such annual limits.

As it suffers through a ravaging financial crisis, the nation’s most populous county spends well over half a billion dollars annually just to provide illegal immigrants with welfare food stamps.

For two consecutive years Los Angeles County has doled out more than $550 million just to cover the welfare and food-stamp costs for illegal aliens, many of whom collect the U.S. taxpayer benefits on behalf of their anchor babies. In 2010 the tab exceeded $600 million compared to an already exorbitant $570 million in 2009.

The enraging figures have been released by a veteran county lawmaker who points out that they don’t even include the enormous cost of educating, medically treating or incarcerating illegal aliens in the sprawling county of about 10 million residents. That adds more than a billion dollars a year, according to county agency figures.

“When you add this to $550 million for public safety and nearly $500 million for healthcare, the total cost for illegal immigrants to County taxpayers exceeds $1.6 billion dollars a year – not including the hundreds of millions of dollars for education,” said L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich.

Each month the county spends around $53 million to give illegal immigrants food stamps and other welfare benefits, according to the county’s Department of Public Social Services. This amounts to a big chunk—about 22%—of all welfare issuances in the entire county. It also marks a substantial monthly increase (3 million) over the previous year.

Nationwide, the increasing cost of supporting illegal immigrants has taken a huge toll though border states naturally have suffered the brunt of it. Americans annually spend about $113 billion to educate, incarcerate, medically treat and otherwise support illegal aliens around the country. The bulk of the cost—about $84.2 billion—is absorbed by state and local governments, according to figures released over the summer by a group that studies the impact of illegal immigration.

Educating the children of illegal immigrants constitutes the single largest cost to American taxpayers, about $52 billion a year, according to a lengthy report published by the group. Nearly all of the costs are absorbed by state and local governments as the feds fail miserably to seal the increasingly porous southern border.