Let’s start this year off with some good old fashioned political class insanity where the wasting of taxpayer dollars and the corruption and incompetence of government programs never cease to provide a dismal picture of how inept the American political class continues to be.
1)Far too often we have discussed two things:
A very basic function of any government entity is to protect the lives and property of the folks they represent.
Over the decades, Chicago politicians have shown no ability at all to fulfill this basic government requirement, almost always leading the nation in violence, murders, and crime.
And the current mayoral administration of Brandon Johnson continues this distressing tradition:
At least 28 Chicago residents were shot over the Christmas weekend in Chicago.
Six of those wounded died from their gunshot wounds.
Johnson continues to deny the reality that hundreds of residents are killed every year in his city and thousands are wounded by gunshots, insisting back in August: "Homicides are down nearly 32%. Shootings and shooting victims are down nearly 40%," Johnson told CNN in August.
He omitted the reality that the city has led the country in homicides for 13 consecutive years.
In fact, in 2024 the city’s homicide rate was 17.5 per 100,000 residents, an amazing four times higher than New York City’s murder rate and three times higher than the Los Angeles murder rate.
Another weekend, another month, another year and Chicago politicians still cannot find a way to fulfill a basic government need: protect the lives and property of the citizens they serve.
2)We have spent a lot of time over the past few posts covering the disgusting taxpayer fraud that has been uncovered in government programs in Minnesota, fraud that now looks like at least $9 billion of taxpayer wealth got siphoned off by Somali criminal gangs and cartels. This fraud has been going on for years and despite hundreds of whistle blower employees in Minnesota state government offices, the state politicians including Governor Tim Walz either ignored those alarms or, as has been reported in some cases, suppressed those alarms and the whistle blowers.
And while the fraud in Minnesota has been horrific, at least one whistleblower in yet another state says there is massive fraud in state government programs in their state also:
Ohio attorney, Mehek Cooke, recently came forward to allege that Somali criminal gangs were also systematically looting Ohio’s state Medicaid program for over ten years.
The Ohio Somali fraud used fake, non-existent home health care operations which billed taxpayers up to $250,000 a year per family for services never provided.
A loophole in the Ohio Medicaid program allowed family members to be recognized as paid home health care providers.
The fraud criminals made claims that elderly patients needed round the clock healthcare, often when they did not need any assistance at all, and then billed the Ohio Medicaid program for the ghost healthcare.
According to Ms. Cooke: “You can go in and you can say, 'My aging parent needs home health care, and I want to provide it. The state will, as long as the doctor has approved it, continue to pay you."
The fraudsters could then add on other family members and could get up to $250,000 a year for taking care of no one.
Of course, you need a doctor’s confirmation that there was indeed a patient in need of home health care which means a lot of doctors are also involved in the scam, getting kickbacks from those collecting the bogus home health care money.
Ms. Cooke thinks that the Ohio fraud may be even greater than the Minnesota fraud since the Ohio fraud has been going on longer.
She also believes that similar scams of taxpayer wealth are going on in Pennsylvania and other states.
Congratulations, respect, and thanks to Nick Shirley up in Minnesota, Ms. Cooke in Ohio, and the hundreds of honest, caring whistle blockers who are risking their lives exposing this massive abuse of taxpayer money. The really pathetic part of this fraud is that the American political class and the government agencies they control allowed it to go on for so long. Which obviously raises the simple question: did they allow it to go for so long because they are incompetent or because they themselves were also profiting from it?
3)One of the very few main line journalists that I have any respect for is Catherine Herridge, a former CBS investigative journalist. She always tells it like it is and that has cost her dearly in terms of her career.
But she continues to soldier on with the latest reporting:
She recently alleged that CBS News executives delayed the broadcast of her investigations and reports on the contents of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop computer.
As you may recall, the Hunter Biden laptop computer contained a trove of embarrassing information that could have derailed Biden’s run for the Presidency in 2020.
It has become obvious since then that most of the mainstream news operations either buried the story or went along with the myth that the laptop did not exist, that it was a Russian disinformation effort and there was nothing to see here.
Ms. Herridge paid dearly for her honest reporting when CBS terminated her in February of 2024.
According to her version of the laptop story: "When we did the story, we did it after the (2022) midterms. I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms and my training is that you should always do the story when it’s ready to go. You should not be dictated by the political cycle. Once we got the laptop story on the morning news, I felt that there was so much there that we could still do. For example, in the text messages, there’s unfortunately, uh, the use of the N word, the liberal use of the N word."
Even the left wing New York Times eventually, in March of 2022, verified that the laptop contents were legit as she had originally reported.
Another honest journalist doing her job, a trait of very few “journalists” these days. And yet another example of where the corporate news media empires protected the incompetence of Joe Biden, shielding him from any accusations that would inhibit his campaign. No wonder Gallup finds that under 30% of Americans have any faith in today’s mass media news organizations.
4)Let’s finish today with a continuing story of stupidity out in California. Before getting into the details keep in mind:
There were no slaves or cotton plantations in California before and during the Civil War.
No one from the Civil War era is still around, neither plantation/slave owners or slaves themselves.
Any descents of slaves are 160 years removed from the conflict and the plantations.
And yet, certain liberal elements in the political class consider it their duty to pay monetary “reparations” to the far distant relatives of slaves who died over a hundred years ago. It makes no sense to think that 160 years after the war ended that someone is still suffering as a result of that conflict.
But liberal elements in San Francisco and California feel so guilty about the Civil War that they want to hand out millions of dollars to people in the city and state who may have a distant relationship to 1800 era slaves:
Based on a 2023 report by the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, San Francisco has created a reparations fund ordinance.
The funny thing is that while the ordinance creates the fund, it provides no way to fund the reparations.
One of the proposals on how to fund and then distribute funds, is to give slave descendants $5 million each to compensate their families for decades of harm.
Other proposals for compensation include a guaranteed annual income of $97,000 and city funded housing.
There are also no guidelines on how to verify a black city resident is actually a slave descendant.
Never mind the reality that the city is facing a $1 billion budget deficit for basic government services.
Thus, the mayor, who signed the ordinance to set up reparations,m admits there is no way for the city government to fund it: “That means identifying key priorities for funding so we can continue delivering those services well. Given these historic fiscal challenges, the city does not have resources to allocate to this fund.”
So stupid and so typical: create a government program with no auditing processes or budget or financing. In light of the massive government fraud going on in Minnesota, you can bet that if the program ever gets funded, either with tax money or private money, a lot of folks in the city are suddenly going to claim to be descendants of slaves.
Plus, if you really want to help the black community, why not put the funds, assuming they ever appear, to fix today’s problems with today’s black residents? Why not use reparation money to improve the educational opportunities and quality of black kids in sub-standard city schools? Why not provide job training to black city residents to improve their lives? Why not provide housing, food, and medical care to black residents in need? Giving $5 million to a single descendant of a slave makes no sense when that money could be put to much better use for many moore black city residents.
But many white liberal have this Civil War guilt complex so rational uses of the money are not on the radar of the guilty perpetrators of reparations.
Enough for today: more stupid reparations plans, CBS News sat on what became true Hunter Biden laptop stories, Ohio may be the next location to uncover years of government program fraud, and Chicago is still violent.
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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:
https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom
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