Disgraced College Researcher Used Actors to Testify on His Behalf

This guy seems like a perfect fit for the man-made global warming crowd.

A former researcher at the University at Buffalo was criminally charged today with using actors to portray witnesses testifying on his behalf at a formal misconduct hearing.

The testimony from the bogus witnesses enabled William Fals-Stewart, 48, of Eden, to be exonerated, according to Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo.

Fals-Stewart then attempted to sue the state for $4 million, claiming he had been wrongly forced out of his job.

"The Office of Attorney General, in its role of defending the university and the state in the court action, conducted a thorough investigation of the claims against the university," Cuomo said in a press statement issued this afternoon. "It was during this investigation that [investigators] discovered the alleged fraud, forced Fals-Stewart to withdraw his lawsuit and initiated a criminal investigation."

How stupid. He wound up getting the boot from the University of Buffalo and could have simply moved on, but he got greedy. Oh, and where was it he landed since then? Why, Harvard, of course. Granted, it appears the folks there have caught wind of his fraud and redirected his homepage here. He's also listed as being affiliated with the University of Rochester at some point.

Fals-Stewart was arrested today on charges of attempted grand larceny, three counts of perjury, three counts of identity theft, two counts of offering a false instrument and three counts of falsifying business records, all felonies.

Authorities said Fals-Stewart engaged in the fraudulent conduct in an attempt to rescue his reputation after leaving his UB job, under pressure, in 2005. He left after being accused of scientific misconduct, for allegedly fabricating data in a federally funded study.

In court papers, prosecutors said Fals-Stewart hired three actors to portray witnesses supporting Fals-Stewart. The witnesses testified by telephone because Fals-Stewart claimed they were out of town and unavailable to appear in person.

"In reality, they were actors who thought they were taking part in a mock trial," the attorney general's office said. "[Fals-Stewart] told the three actors, who he had hired before for legitimate training videos, that they would be performing in a mock trial training exercise. They were not aware that they were testifying at a real administrative hearing, nor did they know they were impersonating real people."

Fals-Stewart, a former researcher at UB's Research Institute on Addictions, is accused of providing the actors with "scripts" that "were riddled with inaccuracies regarding his research," state attorneys said.

Maybe there's an opening at the University of East Anglia.

Fals-Stewart received an award while at Rochester in 2008. The folks who gave him that want want to do an inquiry themselves, unless his science is settled, of course.

Here's another Harvard-related page with him still listed. The felony complaint is here. He faces 15 years for his crimes.

Another Union Success Story

New Yorkers should really be thrilled to know this guy is on the Department of Education payroll.

A Queens teacher who collects a $100,000 salary for doing nothing spends time in a Department of Education "rubber room" working on his law practice and managing 12 real-estate properties worth an estimated $7.8 million, The Post found.

Alan Rosenfeld hasn't set foot in a classroom for nearly a decade since he was accused in 2001 of making lewd comments to junior-high girls and "staring at their butts," yet the department still pays him handsomely for sitting on his own butt seven hours a day.

In 2001, six eighth-graders at IS 347 in Queens accused Rosenfeld, a typing teacher who filled in for an absent dean, of making comments like "You have a sexy body," asking one whether she had a boyfriend and making others feel uncomfortable with creepy leers.

Because the Department of Education could not produce all the students as witnesses, he was found guilty in only one case. A girl testified that Rosenfeld stopped at her locker, where she was standing with a friend, and "said I love him because I talk to him so much."

A DOE hearing officer gave him a slap on the wrist -- a week off without pay -- for "conduct unbecoming a teacher." He was cleared to return to teaching.

Instead, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has kept the scruffy 64-year-old in a Brooklyn rubber room, deeming him too dangerous to be near kids, officials said.

The DOE can't fire him.

"We have to abide by the union contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

So Rosenfeld simply collects his $100,049 salary -- top scale for teachers -- plus full health benefits and the promise of a fat pension, about $82,000 a year if he were to retire today.

His pension will grow by $1,700 each year he remains. He could have retired at age 62, but he stays.

He has also accumulated about 435 unused sick days -- and will get paid for half of them when he retires.

If that's not bad enough, this creep spends his time doing other business on city time, an obvious violation. Guess since he's union nodoboy can touch him.

A licensed attorney since 1973, Rosenfeld frequently talks on the phone to clients and other lawyers, insiders say.

"He's always working," one said.

City rules forbid staffers to conduct business on DOE time.

He refers to himself as "Dr. Rosenfeld" and often insults fellow teachers, calling them "losers" and "deadbeats."

He also doles out legal advice to his rubber roommates.

Surprise! Another Bogus Report From UN Climate Panel Exposed

If ClimateGate and the bogus Himalayas glacier reports weren't enough to finish off the credibility of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this latest disclosure may well do the trick.

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in The Sunday Times, it was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report.

Despite report after report being exposed as fraudulent, the global warming mantra still won't go away.

The IPCC has been put on the defensive as well over its claims that climate change may be increasing the severity and frequency of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

This weekend Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, was fighting to keep his job after a barrage of criticism.

Scientists fear the controversies will be used by climate change sceptics to sway public opinion to ignore global warming — even though the fundamental science, that greenhouse gases can heat the world, remains strong.

How can anyone still claim that with a straight face when all the "evidence" to make such a claim is bogus?

The latest controversy originates in a report called A Global Review of Forest Fires, which WWF published in 2000. It was commissioned from Andrew Rowell, a freelance journalist and green campaigner who has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anti-smoking organisations. The second author was Peter Moore, a campaigner and policy analyst with WWF.

Hard to believe someone from the radical Greenpeace would stretch the truth, isn't it?

Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at Leeds University who specialises in tropical forest ecology, described the section of Rowell and Moore’s report predicting the potential destruction of large swathes of rainforest as “a mess”.

“The Nature paper is about the interactions of logging damage, fire and periodic droughts, all extremely important in understanding the vulnerability of Amazon forest to drought, but is not related to the vulnerability of these forests to reductions in rainfall,” he said.

“In my opinion the Rowell and Moore report should not have been cited; it contains no primary research data.”

Famed climatologist Al Gore remains unavailable for comment.

He Lied

I must say, one thing about ClimateGate and all the fraud surrounding the global warming junk science has at least driven Al Gore underground. It should also drive this guy into hiding at the very least as well.

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.

He much prefers junk science instead.

Speaking of Algore, I'm wondering whether he'll be denouncing Osama bin Laden for co-opting his talking points or announcing a lecture series with the two of them? Wouldn't it be amusing if a dog-eared copy of Earth in the Balance was found in bin Laden's cave, just as it was with the Unabomber?

Climate Clowns Fess Up to Even More Errors in Bogus Himalayas Study

The other day we noted that Nobel Prize winning report by the IPCC that now they admit is full of errors. Now it just keeps getting worse as they cop to even more errors.

e Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel's assessment of Himalayan glaciers.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible.

“I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.”

No, can't be shooting from the hip. Like, say, dismissing critics by calling them deniers when you know full well your report is nothing more than a hoax.

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999.

The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

Dr Pachauri said that the IPCC’s report was the responsibility of the panel’s Co-Chairs at the time, both of whom have since moved on.

They were Dr Martin Parry, a British scientist now at Imperial College London, and Dr Osvaldo Canziani, an Argentine meteorologist. Neither was immediately available for comment.

“I don’t want to blame them, but typically the working group reports are managed by the Co-Chairs,” Dr Pachauri said. “Of course the Chair is there to facilitate things, but we have substantial amounts of delegation.”

He declined to blame the 25 authors and editors of the erroneous part of the report, who included a Filipino, a Mongolian, a Malaysian, an Indonesian, an Iranian, an Australian and two Vietnamese.

If the Nobel committee had the slightest bit of integrity and credibility they'd rescind the Nobel Prize immediately or at the very least investigate. But they'll never do that since our preening moral superior, Al Gore, shared the prize with this pack of frauds.

Hot Air links. Thanks!

Brooklyn ACORN Community Organizer Accused of Fraud

After we noted the dubious ACORN HS for Social Justice yesterday you just had to know there were more layers to peel back to uncover some fraud involved. Sure enough today we discover a community organizer involved with ACORN, the New York City Department of Education and the ACORN HS for Social Justice is being accused of fraud.

ACORN and fraud: Perfect together.

The free corporate rewards gifts arrived by the dozens: $5,000 IBM gift certificates, $500 travel coupons, Broadway show tickets, tickets to Mets and Yankees games. The only problem was that, according to city schools investigators, it was all based on a scam.

Investigators on Tuesday alleged that a Brooklyn-based bookkeeper and community organizer for the beleaguered anti-poverty group Acorn improperly netted $500,000 in merchandise for a corporate rewards program with Verizon, the telephone company, through a complex scam that went on for more than four years.

“She left no stone unturned,” said Richard J. Condon, the special commissioner of investigations for the city’s schools.

Investigators said the fraud began in 2004, when the woman, Donnett Davis, was working at the financial desk at a Brooklyn office of Acorn. She opened a corporate rewards program for Acorn’s 10 to 20 phone lines with Verizon, but put her name as the recipient in order to get the rewards herself, she told investigators, according to a report submitted to Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, on Tuesday.

Shortly afterward, investigators allege, Ms. Davis added about 9,000 Department of Education phone lines to her rewards account. With millions of dollars in billings, the trickle of reward points became a roaring torrent of gift certificates, L.L. Bean merchandise and other freebies, investigators said.

It is not known how Ms. Davis got access to the Department of Education numbers, but Mr. Cordon said he suspects she may have had help from someone within the department or Verizon. “We’re not alleging she did it alone,” Mr. Cordon said. “Quite frankly we would be surprised if she did.”

New York Acorn terminated Ms. Davis’s employment in April 2008, Arthur Schwartz, counsel for Acorn, said Tuesday. Shortly afterward, Ms. Davis went to work directly for the Department of Education, as the parent coordinator for an Acorn-affiliated school, the Acorn High School for Social Justice in Brooklyn.

There, the scam continued until Verizon discovered the suspicious activity in October 2008 while auditing its accounts, and the Department of Education began an investigation. Ms. Davis resigned from her schools job in August, the letter to Mr. Klein said. The matter has been referred to prosecutors.

H/T Big Government.

How is it someone can be terminated from ACORN and then go directly to work for the DoE? Isn't there any vetting? Or did she have cushy union connections that allowed her to glide right in?

Now despite Klein's assertion she was dismissed in August, Davis is still listed as a parent coordinator at the School for Social Justice. There has not been a reply to an email inquiry to that address.

Meanwhile the attorney for Davis responded.

Davis's attorney Scott Cerbin downplayed the accusations. "As of this time, I'm not aware of any criminal charges," he said.

Your Government In Action: Four-Year-Olds Now Qualify for Homebuyer Credit

Not only can your pre-schoolers now qualify for a first time home-buying loan, but if you've got some more kids in the pipeline they too may be qualify thanks to a helping hand from Senator Christopher Dodd.

They may not be able to cross the street on their own or color within the lines, but many kids qualified for the first-time homebuyer credit.

Due to a loophole and some odd reporting criteria, children as young as 4 received the first-time homebuyer credit that Congress passed last year, according to PoliticsDaily.com. The credit is worth $8,000 and was created to encourage first-time buyers to purchase a home.

More than 500 people have used their children to sign up, with one parent using a 4-year-old to get the credit, the site reported.

These types of claims are among the myriad cases of fraud that have cost the government nearly half a billion dollars, federal investigators told Congress.

Fraudulent claims include people who received the credit but have not purchased homes, who already owned homes, or who were in the country illegally. More worrying, numerous IRS employees have applied for the credit who should not have.

Chalk up another success for big gubmint.

Meanwhile, on the heels of this news comes word this program will likely be extended. Wonderful.

The temporary program was created by Congress in 2008 to jolt the weakened housing market and was renewed and expanded in 2009 by the $787 billion stimulus bill. This week Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) began a push to expand the credit to all homebuyers and extend the deadline, now set for Nov. 30th, to July 2010.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), chairman of the subcommittee, said that 1.4 million families have claimed nearly $10 billion in credits, but that the speed of implementing the program meant policing fraud was at first unacceptably poor. "We want to and we need to stop this fraud and abuse," he said.

Good luck with that. Really instills confidence these idiots can run our healthcare system, doesn't it?

I wonder how deep the tentacles from ACORN are into the scam?

Honesty Is For Suckers

It hasn't been a good day for the Obama administration. Their credibility is shrinking in light of their juvenile slap fight with Fox News, the GAO releases a report showing that the TARP funds for the most part just evaporated into thin air,the Nancy and Harry comedy duo can't get their act together on the healthcare takeover plan, and former vice president Dick Cheney delivered a smack upside their head as far as a plan for Afghanistan that is going to leave a mark and now this comes out this afternoon.

It seems, according to this inspector general, that tens of thousands of people have received $8,000 checks from the government for purchasing a new home that were not eligible to receive such checks. We aren't talking about some little technical detail in the paperwork where they didn't dot all the I's or cross the T's. No we are talking about checks being cut for children as young as 4, illegal aliens, and at least 53 IRS employees, whose job it was to oversee the program to start with.



Now of course there is talk on Capitol Hill to extend this program.

How many times do you have to be the victim of scams before you finally learn the lesson that if you give away other peoples money the line of people to que up with their hands out will extend to the horizon?

Stunner: Sharpton Involved In Another Phony Rape Tale?

Hey Al, how's that lawsuit against Rush Limbaugh coming along? Not so good, huh? Well, you've got other things to worry about now other than helping instigate riots. Looks like you've got another Tawana Brawley on your hands. I hope Limbaugh has a field day with this one, you fraud.

A troubled young woman whom the Rev. Al Sharpton championed as a victim of a horrific, racially motivated sexual assault now says she fabricated the incident -- despite the fact that all of her alleged attackers pleaded guilty and are serving jail time.

Megan Williams, who is black, wasn't kidnapped and tortured in a West Virginia trailer at the hands of white attackers -- but lied because she wanted to get back at a boyfriend who'd beaten her, her lawyer, Byron Potts, said.

"She told me the only thing not self-inflicted were the bruises on her face," he said at a news conference.

"She is recanting the entire incident. She says it did not happen, and she's scared."

When her allegations went public in 2007, Sharpton rallied to her side and pressed authorities to indict the accused attackers for hate crimes, even as local NAACP leaders urged restraint.

"Our involvement surrounded a call for hate-crime investigations and we did not know the truths or nontruths of the investigation," Sharpton said in a statement yesterday.

Two years ago, a then-20-year-old Williams told Logan County, W.Va., authorities that seven white people held her captive in a trailer where she was stabbed, beaten, sexually assaulted, scalded and taunted with racially charged epithets.

Sharpton, who has never apologized for his leading role in the Brawley affair, or anything else for that matter, is looking to somehow save face.

Sharpton -- who now wants a new investigation -- already has a record tarnished by his drum-beating for Tawana Brawley's discredited 1987 claim that she was gang-raped by white cops. Authorities believe Brawley made up the story to avoid punishment for staying out late.

Shocker! Oversight for Stimulus Cash Proves Flimsy

The folks at CBS News better look out or someone is going to snitch on them.

How dare they expose the hypocrisy of our Dear Leader!

From airport improvements to highway construction, some of the federal programs getting the most stimulus money also represent the greatest possibility of waste and fraud.

In touting its stimulus package earlier this year, the Obama administration promised to watch spending like a hawk.

"If a federal agency proposes a project that will waste that money, I will put a stop to it," President Obama pledged back in February.

But in reality, federal agencies are largely left to monitor their own spending. And new findings show there's good reason to question how hard they're really trying to expose waste and abuse in their own agencies.

It started when the U.S. inspector general began digging to see how well the Department of Transportation was watching over four programs identified as its most likely trouble spots - the Federal-Aid Highway Program, Federal Transit Administration Formula Grants Program, FTA Capital Investment Grants Program, and the FAA Airport Improvement Program.

Together, those programs are receiving $37 billion dollars in stimulus fund.

But the inspector general found something shocking and issued an urgent advisory saying basically that the Transportation Department's effort to quantify improper payments was basically worthless.

The inspector general said when the department's contractor checked invoices for discrepancies, it chose sample sizes that were too small and not random, meaning the results were "not credible," "misleading" and "do not … represent the seriousness and extent of the problem."

But who are we to questions our moral superiors? No, we just have to get out of the way and shut up.

Great Idea! Let's Involve ACORN in the Census

What could possibly go wrong with a criminal enterprise involved in the 2010 census?

The U.S. Census is supposed to be free of politics, but one group with a history of voter fraud, ACORN, is participating in next year's count, raising concerns about the politicization of the decennial survey.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now signed on as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States -- currently believed to be more than 306 million people.

A U.S. Census "sell sheet," an advertisement used to recruit national partners, says partnerships with groups like ACORN "play an important role in making the 2010 Census successful," including by "help[ing] recruit census workers."

The bureau is currently employing help from more than 250 national partners, including TARGET and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to assist in the hiring effort.

But ACORN's partnership with the 2010 Census is worrisome to lawmakers who say past allegations of fraud should raise concerns about the organization.

"It's a concern, especially when you look at all the different charges of voter fraud. And it's not just the lawmakers' concern. It should be the concern of every citizen in the country," Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland, R-Ga., vice ranking member of the subcommittee for the U.S. Census, told FOXNews.com. "We want an enumeration. We don't want to have any false numbers."

ACORN, which claims to be a non-partisan grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people, came under fire in 2007 when Washington State filed felony charges against several paid ACORN employees and supervisors for more than 1,700 fraudulent voter registrations. In March 2008, an ACORN worker in Pennsylvania was sentenced for making 29 phony voter registration forms. The group's activities were frequently questioned in the 2008 presidential election.

UN Admits Anti-Poverty Program Is In Shambles

Makes you wonder why we keep pouring more money into this corrupt, inefficient mess known as the United Nations.

Also makes you wonder why the Democrats never miss an opportunity to pander to them. Probably because both entities just love sucking on the public teat and want to guilt-trip the taxpaying suckers out there into doing more to help the children.

For all the waste and fraud we've seen, this one may take the cake.

The multibillion-dollar procurement business of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.N.’s flagship anti-poverty agency, is a gigantic shambles, according to UNDP’s own investigators.

Moreover, UNDP’s management has privately acknowledged that fact and is scrambling to fix the mess — even as it loudly denied concerns of a procurement scandal that have been raised by FOX News, among others.

In a confidential report obtained by FOX News, UNDP’s auditors have described the UNDP procurement organization that is spending well over $2 billion annually as:

— overwhelmed by its caseload at headquarters and in the field, while procurement ballooned from $800 million in 2003 to $2.5 billion in 2006 and $2.2 billion last year;

— often failing to provide plans to support its buying activities, which the report says causes many purchases of goods and services to be carried out on an "ad hoc basis" (in fact, more than $595 million worth of non-existent purchases were recorded, although the audit notes that they were not paid for);

— wallowing in shoddy paperwork and faulty bidding processes, which contributed to a "high number of waivers of the competitive process and to quality problems in the procurement process in general";

— lacking the expertise to evaluate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of its most expensive and important purchases in civic construction and high-tech communications;

— drastically unqualified: Fully half of the organization’s procurement staff around the world were not certified for the basic requirements of their jobs, while the auditors also found the six-hour course for those who were certified to be "inadequate." Additionally, the auditors noted, "there are entire offices without a single certified buyer";

— suffering from an "apparent" conflict of interest at the top, where the people charged with vetting the procurement process for flaws are also members of the procurement office staff.

But wait, there's more!

Even more ominously, the same auditors point out that UNDP:

— has no sure way of knowing whether it is doing business with organizations that the U.N. itself has condemned for terrorist ties and says UNDP country offices find the current manual system of cross-checking with U.N. terrorist sanctions lists to be "cumbersome and inefficient";

— has no formal policy for suspending or removing vendors for poor performance or corruption;

— and doesn’t ask new vendors for the identity of their owners or other corporate ties. This raises the possibility that vendors caught out for corruption or poor performance could simply switch names and reapply for approved status.

Read on. It actually gets worse.

Islamophobia? What Islamophobia?

Ever since 9/11, when Muslim terrorists murdered thousands of Americans, we've heard about an alleged surge in hate crimes against Muslims, especially from the unindicted co-conspirators at CAIR.

Well, as it turns out, it's all BS.

Shocking these thugs would lie to us, isn't it?

See the IBD story.

Not only are anti-Islamic hate crimes way down, but they're a fraction of overall religious hate crimes. The overwhelming majority of such crimes target Jews, something CAIR and other Muslim groups don't seem all that concerned about.

In 2006, a whopping 66% of religiously motivated attacks were on Jews, while just 11% targeted Muslims, even though the Jewish and Muslim populations are similar in size. Catholics and Protestants, who together account for 9% of victims, are subject to almost as much abuse as Muslims in this country.

Last year's anti-Islamic hate crimes totaled 156. While just one hate crime is one too many, that's a 68% drop from 2001.

The FBI report gives lie to CAIR's alarmist narrative of "Islamophobic" lynch mobs marching on mosques across America. In reality, Americans have been remarkably, and admirably, tolerant and respectful of Muslims and their institutions since 9/11.

It's plain that CAIR, which claims to be the "Muslim NAACP," has been hyping tensions.

Which is why the media should ignore their bogus claims.

More from Captain's Quarters, Sundries Shack and Michelle Malkin.

Why Mrs. Clinton Wants Illegals to Have Driver's Licenses

Two simple words: Moter Voter.

Or as it became known in some precincts: Auto Fraudo.

The Motor Voter legislation was a windfall for Democrats in their never-ending quest for fraudulent votes and The Pantsuit knows she need every possible illegal vote in order to win. Bamboozling the idiot vote just isn't enough to scam her way into the White House.

The background here is the National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as "Motor Voter," that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993. It required all states to offer voter registration to anyone getting a driver's license. One simply fills out a form and checks a box stating he is a citizen; he is then registered and in most states does not have to show any ID to vote.

But no one checks if the person registering to vote is indeed a citizen. That greatly concerns New York election officials, who processed 245,000 voter registrations at DMV offices last year. "It would be [tough to catch] if someone wanted to . . . get a number of people registered who aren't citizens and went ahead and got them drivers' licenses," says Lee Daghlian, spokesman for New York's Board of Elections. Assemblywoman Ginny Fields, a Long Island Democrat, warns that the state's "Board of Elections has no voter police" and that the state probably has upwards of 500,000 illegal immigrants old enough to drive.

Thanks to former President Clinton, eight of the 19 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote.

Who knows, they'll probably be casting their vote for Hillary, the choice of terrorists everywhere.

The potential for fraud is not trivial, as federal privacy laws prevent cross-checking voter registration rolls with immigration records. Nevertheless, a 1997 Congressional investigation found that "4,023 illegal voters possibly cast ballots in a disputed House election" in California. After 9/11, the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote.

Under pressure from liberal groups, some states have even abandoned the requirement that people check a citizenship box to be put on the voter rolls. Iowa has told local registrars they should register people even if they leave the citizenship box blank. Maryland officials wave illegal immigrants through the registration process, prompting a Justice Department letter warning they may be helping people violate federal law.

Gov. Spitzer is treading perilously close to that. Despite a tactical retreat this week--he says he will only give illegal immigrants a license that isn't valid for airplane travel and entering federal buildings--Mr. Spitzer has taken active steps to obliterate any distinctions between licenses given to citizens and non-citizens.

In a memo last Sept. 24, he ordered county clerks to remove the visa expiration date and "temporary visitor" stamp on licenses issued to non-citizens who are legally in the country. A Spitzer spokeswoman explained the change was made because the "temporary" label was "pejorative," given that some visitors might eventually stay in the U.S. Under fire, Mr. Spitzer backed down this week, delaying the cancellation of the "temporary visitor" stamps through the end of next year.

The left will stop at nothing to steal elections, and Spitzer and his boss Hillary don't even care if you know about it.