Baltimore Mayor Sheila A. Dixon was charged today with 12 counts of felony theft, perjury, fraud and misconduct in office, becoming the city's first sitting mayor to be criminally indicted.
The case stems in part from at least $15,348 in gifts Dixon allegedly received from her former boyfriend, prominent city developer Ronald H. Lipscomb, while she was City Council president. She also is accused of using as much as $3,400 in gift cards, some donated to her office for distribution to "needy families," to purchase Best Buy electronics and other items for herself and her staff.
Lipscomb was not indicted in the Dixon case, but he and City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton were charged this week in a separate $12,500 bribery scheme. Both cases grew out of a nearly three-year probe by the state prosecutor into City Hall corruption.
The investigation has hung over Dixon, a Democrat, even as she became the city's first female mayor and oversaw a significant decrease in the city's homicide rate, reducing killings to a 20-year low. Viewed as an energetic and charismatic leader, she has earned praise from residents for implementing an easy-to-use recycling program and displaying a willingness to tackle the city's systemic racial and economic disparities.
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1 comment:
There have been several democratic scandals in the past months: William Jefferson, Blaggo, this Dixon case, Kilpatrick (mayor of Detroit). All of them are indicative of what we can expect in the coming years with total democratic dominance of the executive/legislative branch.
Think about it. In the past, whenever the democrats slipped up they typically would come out with the familiar mantra of blaming the nearest republican.
For example, in the Blaggo case, if Fitzpatrick was not already the dems favorite prosecutor, he would have been vilified, ala Ken Starr, as being on a witch hunt. If the Illinois legistature was majority republican, we would have been reading in the NYT about the partisan attack dogs going after a governor who was only trying to help the least fortunate.
The fact of the matter is that in all these cases the democrats, and their extended famility (Main Stream Media) looked very hard for republicans to pin this on. But the republicans are all gone. I.e. the democrat game plan is gone.
Now, with the republicans out of the way, the dems actually have to deliver solutions instead of blaming republicans and regular citizens for being obstructionist. Problem is, all they know how to do is point out problems and blame. And since they can't seem to get out of that rut, they have begun to eat their own. Notice what has happened. In each of these cases it's a complete state of paralysis. They won't resolve the Blaggo thing perhaps until March. Everything is tangled up in democratic procedure and courts. The Jefferson thing has been going on since Katrina, and ended 3 years later, not when the democrats took action, but when the people voted him out.
With dems toally in charge we will see what happens when all things have to go through government procedure. Every issue will pass through the process with the grace and comfort of a large kidney stone. We are about to see what will happen with a society run by lawyers and committees. There will be some people that will benefit from this, mainly lawyers and committees. One can already see the little guy getting screwed. Now that's change I can believe in.
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