Tag Archives: politics

Social Services Fraud

Posted on by
Reply

Minnesota’s social services fraud has been going on for years. Faye Bernstein used to work in Minnesota’s Department of Human Services as a compliance officer, but when she started identifying the level of fraud and the lack of controls with which to prevent the fraud and to address it when it did occur in 2019, she started being cut out, slandered, and ultimately forced out.

Since the situation has started getting ovetly addressed, nearly 100 people have been charged…. Two-thirds have been convicted so far in multiple interconnected schemes.

Most of those, though are soldiers, with maybe a made man or two thrown in as scapegoat distractions. It’s really necessary to go after the social services syndicate’s capos along with the capo di tutti i capi, which likely include Minnesota’s Progressive-Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and his syndicate concierge, Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison. If those last two are, in fact, involved, and if they are brought down, two things would result: the Feds would know better how to identify and stop this sort of fraud and jail the perpetrators, and other States might start taking their social services responsibilities more seriously.

Bogus

Posted on by
Reply

A Wall Street Journal article on the requirements to vote under the SAVE Act had this bit of nonsense:

What happens if someone doesn’t have a passport or birth certificate?
The University of Maryland estimated in 2023 that more than 21 million American citizens don’t have ready access to a passport or other documentary evidence of citizenship. ….

Birth certificates are, most definitely, readily available, even if they’re not already in the prospective voter’s immediate possession. It’s straightforward to write to the hospital in which he was born, or the county, if the hospital is no longer operational. Even adoptees, in almost all cases, can determine their birthplace; it’s in their adoption records. It’s a bit more cumbersome when the adoption records have been sealed, but many of those can be opened by a court and the birthplace revealed. The few cases where that’s still not possible are very few, indeed, and present no excuse at all for blocking securing our elections against voter fraud. The fee for birth certificate copies is nominal.

Passports also are readily available; although the timeline for getting one is longer, and the fee is larger.

And this:

What about people who change their name when they get married or due to other circumstances?
The legislation doesn’t explicitly mention married voters or name changes, but does account for situations where a voter’s documents might not perfectly align by addressing “discrepancies in documentation.” Under the bill, an applicant would need to provide additional documentation to election officials to prove their citizenship.

In the particular case of married voters—the vast majority of whom are women—the changed name is an easily solved non-issue. It’s straightforward here, as with birth certificates, to write to the county where the marriage license/certificate was issued. Again, the fee is nominal. Most women in common law marriages haven’t changed their names. Those few occasions where they did and cannot provide documentation can follow the alternative procedures; in any event, these cases also present no excuse for holding up securing our elections.

Those who’ve changed their names “due to other circumstances” can write to the court in which they changed their name and get a copy of the documents recording the change. Here, too, the fee is nominal. The timeline for getting the copies might vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The plaint that evidence of voter fraud being scant is a red herring. It exists; this is an easy way to reduce it further. The thousands of “voters” illegally present in States’ voter rolls presents far too exploitable an opening for fraud. The fact that someone never locks his house door and hasn’t been robbed presents no rationale for continuing the foolishness.

This sort of misinformation, more likely borne of lazily repeating other news writers’ claims rather than doing actual original reporting, is yet another reason why it’s increasingly difficult to take a new writer’s natter seriously.

This is Idiotic

Posted on by
Reply

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD) is putting the SAVE Act up for a vote this week, but he opposes using a talking filibuster to get it passed. Aside from not having the Republican votes and support for that—he’s right on that score; there are far too many timid Reluctant Republicans presently in the Senate—his rationale includes this bit:

In the end, you’re family and this is a team and we need the team to succeed, and you have differences of opinion along the way, and you know, you don’t always get 100% of what you want[.]

This is the idiotic part. The Progressive-Democratic Party Senators don’t agree that they’re part of any Senatorial family, nor are they members of any team but their own. They’re holding themselves apart, attempting to dictate to the Senate and impose their demands, regardless of what any other Senator—or us average Americans—might think. It’s only necessary to see their behavior vis-à-vis their shutdown of DHS over their personal demands regarding ICE to understand this.

When half the Senate believes itself not part of any family, when that half holds itself out as their own team, it’s idiotic for the other half to act like the whole is a family or that there’s some sort of teamwork available.

Tax-Addicted Progressive-Democrats

Posted on by
Reply

Party has never seen a tax or an increase in existing taxes they don’t like. Washington and New York present examples.

Washington demonstrates the desperation for ever more tax fixes that Party needs to feed its collective addiction for OPM. The State’s Party is determined to impose a 9.9% tax on household income over $1 million a year.

On Monday lawmakers in Olympia pulled an all-nighter to push through the legislation, which [Progressive-]Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson has said he will sign. The bill passed the House 51-46 and goes back to the state Senate.

Never mind that the State’s citizens have repeatedly rejected income taxes in referendum after referendum. What do Party politicians care about the wishes of the small people of their State.

Never mind, either, that the State’s constitution forbids any form of income tax. What do Party politicians care about laws, however foundational, that get in their way?

And never mind that the State’s Senate Majority Leader, Manka Dhingra (D), campaigned for office on her opposition to income taxes, and now in office, actively supports this one. What do Party politicians care about truth or honesty?

Next is New York.

Democratic senators want to increase the state’s top income tax rate by 0.5 percentage points on households making more than $5 million. That would raise the top state-and-local rate in New York City to 15.3%. They also propose to raise the state’s corporate tax to 9% from 7.25% on businesses with more than $5 million income and let New York City raise its corporate tax rate to 10.62% from 8.85%. All told, large businesses would pay a nearly 20% tax rate in New York City.

And this one:

Governor Kathy Hochul, Democratic legislators, and union leaders held a rally over the weekend in support of rolling back the state’s 2012 pension reforms that raised the retirement age to 63 and requires workers to contribute between 3% and 6% of their paychecks to their pensions. “I’m fighting for a fair pension plan,” the Governor declared.

I’m not sure France is a useful model to emulate in the areas of work and retirement.

Taxes are a far more powerful addiction for Party politicians than are nicotine, or sugar, or opioids for us average Americans. Worse, Party’s addiction is severely damaging to our nation, whereas nicotine, sugar, and opioid addictions do their primary damage to the users.

Talking Filibuster

Posted on by
Reply

It’s complicated, claims Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD), and it’s a mirage claim the editors at The Wall Street Journal.

Thune:

The talking filibuster idea “is much more complicated and risky than people are assuming,” Majority Leader John Thune told reporters this week. He said Tuesday that Republicans lack the votes to get to a talking filibuster or sustain one if they did.

The editors:

The reality is that Democratic Senators could take turns giving interminable speeches. Cory Booker last year went 25 hours all by himself. Meantime, Republicans would have to keep most of their Senators handy at all times, ready to answer a quorum call, meaning it would turn into an endless GOP campout. Bring your pajamas, toothbrush, and CPAP machine.

And

Democrats could offer amendments that either undermine the bill’s intent or put swing-state Republicans on the spot. Raise the minimum wage? Extend ObamaCare subsidies? What else?

The editors are straight up wrong with their claims, though. Look past this poster’s over-the-top polemics, and look at the facts presented. Under existing Senate rules, Senators are limited to two speeches per day on a particular piece of legislation. A Senate day, though, isn’t 24 hours; it runs from Senate adjournment to Senate adjournment. Recesses don’t count. And recesses could be had for hygiene breaks, grabbing a drink of water, eating something, etc. All Thune would have to do is not adjourn the Senate once the SAVE Act is brought to the floor until it’s voted on.

Endless amendment proffers? The Majority Leader controls the amendment process, including being first to offer amendments. Just as Reid did routinely (and other Majority Leaders of either party), Thune could fill the amendment tree with his own amendments, preventing the Progressive-Democratic Party, and Precious Republicans, from offering their own amendments. That imposes a small and finite number of amendments and votes on them.

Do the “camping,” but it would be only for a week or two. The limiting factor is those Republicans themselves. Republicans lack the votes to get to a talking filibuster or sustain one if they did? As recently as mid-February, the Republicans had 50 votes for the Act, which with the Vice President’s vote, is all he majority they need. Is Thune really saying he can’t hold his caucus together in the face of Progressive-Democrat intransigence? If so, that, in the eventuality, would be the end of the Republican Party for a long sequence of election cycles, as they would be exposing themselves as not having the stomach for serious struggle.

The editors rationalized their position with this cover excuse for those Reluctant Republicans’ timidity:

Democrats would have done it [used the talking filibuster] already—and they’d certainly copy the maneuver next time to pass far more transformational bills than the SAVE America Act.

That’s not an excuse for timidity; it’s simply stating a fact. The Progressive-Democrats most assuredly will use it, whether or not they eliminate the cloture vote filibuster when next they get a Senate majority. Republicans using it now is irrelevant to that.

General George Patton:

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time.

That appears to be not the case with today’s crop of Republicans, if Thune is right.