The son of a renowned Chicano rights politician who chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and authored legislation to reduce gang violence has been charged in a gang-related murder. 

A felony complaint says that California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez’s teenage son and three fellow gang bangers beat and fatally stabbed a college student in San Diego for no particular reason. They also beat and stabbed at least two other young men who survived. 

Esteban Nunez and his posse identified themselves as members of a well-known gang (The Hazard Crew) during an evening of drinking and brutally beat the 22-year-old college student before finishing him off with knives. The gang bangers have been charged with murder, three counts of assault with a deadly weapon and vandalism.

The younger and rather confident Nunez, who proudly sports a tattoo of his gang’s logo, assured his violent buddies that if they were criminally charged his powerful and well-connected politician father could get them off on a self-defense argument.

Indeed Fabian’s dad is well connected and quite popopular in the Golden State. The Democrat lawmaker served three terms in the Assembly, where he authored legislation to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles, and four years as speaker. 

In 2007 Hillary Clinton named Nunez, a well-known illegal immigrant advocate, national co chair of her presidential campaign. A popular figure in the La Raza movement, Nunez helped organize huge marches protesting legislation viewed as discriminatory against illegal aliens and he declared war on California’s governor because the governor supports securing the southern border as well as measures to curb the state’s illegal immigration crisis.  

Earlier this year Nunez was the target of a state ethics commission investigation into the use of political contributions for personal use. The commission banned the practice after newspaper reports that Nunez and a few other legislators had used hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash to travel through Europe and stay at upscale resorts.

Indicating that he’s more concerned with race and sex than merit, New York’s governor expressed outrage that the state’s judicial commission didn’t include enough minority or women candidates to nominate as chief judge. 

As per New York’s Constitution, the governor must select a chief judge for the state’s High Court from a screened list provided by the Commission on Judicial Nomination. This week the panel gave Governor David Paterson seven highly qualified names to replace the retiring Judith Kaye as the chief judge of the state’s High Court. 

The coveted list includes three highly regarded lawyers in private practice and four judges, including two from the Court of Appeals. But the governor publicly blasted the panel for not including any women or Hispanics. His complaint is that the seven candidates are men and only one is black.  

Paterson joined forces with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for a rare public chastising of the state judicial panel, saying that he was outraged. "It seems highly unusual that in a class of seven individuals considered to be capable of supervising the Court of Appeals that not one of them would be a woman, not one." 

The governor appoints the members of the Commission on Judicial Nomination and in fact Paterson appointed one, attorney Frederick K. Brewington, shortly after replacing Eliot Spitzer who resigned in disgrace when he got busted in a hooker scandal. 

Paterson has a few closet skeletons of his own. Shortly after moving into the governor’s mansion he admitted that he had multiple extramarital affairs with a series of women and illegally mingled campaign funds with his romantic engagements. In some instances he used campaign money to pay for hotel trysts with mistresses and to give the women cash. 

A veteran member of a major U.S. county’s Board of Supervisors has been charged with multiple felonies for concealing crucial business assets, associates and land dealings that conflict with his work as an elected official.

The longtime supervisor (Republican Don Stapley) in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the state’s largest, schemed to illegally hide his personal business connections for more than a decade, according to a 118-count indictment filed this week by county prosecutors.

Authorities say Stapley failed to disclose multimillion-dollar parcels of land, hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal and business bank accounts, leadership positions in Arizona corporations and a variety of other lucrative financial holdings. 

At least one of the felonies the politician is accused of involves an associate recently convicted of federal bank fraud. Other charges include perjury, forgery, false swearing and filing a false financial disclosure statement.

Financial disclosure laws exist at the federal, state and local government levels to inform the public of any conflict of interest created by a politician’s financial interests and business dealings. In most cases, the disclosures are considered sworn statements and lying on them can amount to a felony that carries a possible prison sentence. 

Illegal immigrants with criminal histories had to commit four murders—including a high school honor student and an elderly woman—for officials in a Maryland county to finally admit there’s a serious problem with their sanctuary policy.

All of the murderers had been previously arrested and released by police in cities that offer illegal aliens sanctuary. At least two of them were freed by authorities in the affluent Maryland county of Montgomery, a notorious illegal alien sanctuary with a police department that has a don’t-ask-don’t-tell immigration policy.

The victims include a 14-year-old boy shot to death on a crowded public bus by a member of a famously violent gang, a popular waiter stabbed to death, a man viciously attacked with a metal bat and an elderly woman. All of the homicides were committed by illegal immigrants who had been arrested in the past and released rather than deported.

The most recent case, last month's shooting of the teenage high school student, ignited a public outcry that evidently forced county officials to finally take a hard look at the sanctuary policy that has enabled so many illegal aliens to continue their crime sprees. 

The boy was gunned down by an illegal immigrant (Hector Hernandez) from El Salvador who also wounded two other teenagers. The known member of the MS-13 or Mara Salvatrucha gang had been arrested by Montgomery County Police a few weeks earlier for concealing a dangerous weapon and was released. It marked the second time in a year that the department freed an MS-13 member who went on to commit an atrocious crime.  

It took the boy’s ruthless death for a light to at least flicker in the collective heads of Montgomery County officials, who this week said they plan to take a “more proactive approach” to prevent the release of illegal immigrants suspected of serious crimes. One Democrat councilman who is a renowned immigrant advocate actually admitted that "we're talking about the people who are clearly undesirable." 

Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno is defending Eric Holder’s push to pardon a fugitive financier and a pair of terrorists, claiming the White House was bombarded with last-minute requests and there was no time to properly investigate them all. 

For the first time since the Clinton pardon scandal resurfaced, his loyal attorney general is offering some insight on what really went down. The highly controversial last-minute pardons became the focus of numerous media reports when Barack Obama picked Holder to run the Justice Department last month.

Holder was Reno’s deputy attorney under Clinton and he personally orchestrated some of the more shameful pardons, including two terrorists serving lengthy prison sentences and millionaire commodities broker Marc Rich who fled the country to escape prosecution for tax evasion, racketeering and trading with the enemy.

Outraged federal prosecutors had described Rich’s criminal indictment as the biggest tax-fraud case in the history of the United States and the pardon ignited fury at the Justice Department. Acknowledging that such criminals should be brought to justice, Holder later admitted that his public career was over for orchestrating Rich's pardon.

This week one of the nation’s most renowned attorney generals (Reno) tries to comfort us with an outrageous explanation of Holder’s deplorable actions; the fast pace of pardon requests at the end of Clinton’s tenure made it impossible for every candidate to be thoroughly checked out. “There wasn’t much time to vet anybody,” according to Reno.  

Barack Obama has repeatedly chastised failing banks for using subprime loans to victimize borrowers yet his newly crowned inauguration co-chair operated a bank that went under for doing it.

Obama’s prized campaign finance head turned inauguration co-chair, Chicago millionaire Penny Pritzker, was chairwoman of the board of a financial institution that made money (then crashed) giving what the president elect often refers to as “predatory loans” at “teaser rates.”

Subprime loans carry a higher rate of interest than prime loans to compensate for the increased risk of borrowers with bad credit or those who lack the income to qualify for a regular loan. Like Obama, the Department of Housing and Urban Development says minorities, especially blacks, are overwhelmingly targeted by predatory subprime lenders.

Pritzker’s key role in the mess is conveniently omitted from the accolades portion of her biography, which describes her as a business executive and entrepreneur who chairs four major corporations. 

The reality is that Pritzker ran Chicago’s Superior Bank before it collapsed precisely for making too many subprime loans, which she personally pushed for. When the bank went under 1,400 of its customers—Obama might prefer to use the term victims—were left without part of their savings. 

In what federal prosecutors are calling a classic pay-to-play scheme, the mayor of Alabama’s largest city has been arrested and charged with bribery and money laundering for masterminding a multibillion-dollar sewer bond deal that practically bankrupted the surrounding county.

Long the target of a huge federal investigation, Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford has finally been hauled away in handcuffs and charged for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for his influence on bond deals and swaps. The veteran politician committed the crimes while he was president of the Jefferson County Commission, according to authorities who have been watching him for months. 

A 101-count indictment charges the Democrat mayor and two of his investment banker buddies with a series of crimes connected to the Jefferson County bond transactions and swap agreements. Among the charges are conspiracy, bribery, fraud, money laundering and filing false tax returns.

According to the indictment, Langford solicited $235,000 from an Alabama-based bond underwriter and a lobbyist in exchange for his help in getting lucrative government deals. The bribe was delivered in the form of cash, expensive jewelry and fancy clothes. Prosecutors say Langford sold out his public office to his friends through a web of financing agreements. 

Illegal immigrants fired because of a landmark Arizona law that severely punishes businesses caught hiring them have remained in the workforce by using other people’s identities to get jobs.

Fed up with the devastating effect of illegal immigration, legislators in the border state have enacted the nation’s toughest laws to curb the crisis. Among them is a measure, passed last year, which makes it illegal for businesses to hire undocumented workers. Those that do face stiff fines and license revocation.

Fearful of the penalties, businesses throughout the state cleared their payrolls of illegal aliens, who in turn, have managed to circumvent the sanction law by using fake identities and working for cash. The fraud has allowed dozens of undocumented workers and their families to remain in the country illegally, according to a news report published this week.

Examples include a factory worker who borrowed a friend’s Social Security number after a decade of working with a fake one, a construction worker who uses his legal resident brother’s documents at a Phoenix company and a car wash employee paid in cash after getting busted with fake documents as a fast-food restaurant manager.

There are an estimated 200,000 undocumented workers in Arizona who have been affected by the employee verification law, which took effect this year. Many of them worked for years using documents their employers knew were fake and those firms legally challenged the measure, claiming it unconstitutionally infringes on federal immigration powers and discriminates against all Hispanics.  

But earlier this year a federal judge in Phoenix upheld the measure, ruling that it does not conflict with federal immigration law which specifically lets states regulate business licensing. The ruling clarified that federal statutes do not preempt states from suspending or revoking the licenses of firms that break the law.