Guess what? There’s fraud and waste in red states too

The New Neo Posted on by

This should come as no surprise:

Tapscott reported that the most startling takeaway from the 2024 audits (the latest available) was that “the results for the red states are strikingly similar to those of the blue states.” He noted that a sampling of those results “suggests huge waste, fraud, and corruption problems in how blue and red jurisdictions alike manage federal social welfare and other benefit fund programs.”

It shouldn’t be that difficult to put proper controls into the system. One has to conclude there’s little will to do so.

There are some interesting responses in the comments to the linked post. Several commenters point out that red states have blue cities with large populations, and that might be where the fraud occurs. Another commenter points out that some laws around these federal programs make it difficult to check up on the people receiving funds. And here’s another comment:

These programs were created in a high trust era where the public/taxpayer could mostly expect the bureaucracy not to allow fraud. Back then they’d still report shenanigans to supervisors who’d call in the cops and arrest the fraudsters. Today? Most of the bureaucracy is either enabling the fraud out of ideological conviction or too scared to report it b/c they’ve seen how other whistleblowers got hammered for sticking their head up. Many of the programs rely on aspects of ‘honor system’ v harsh audits. There’s many programs which offer instant acceptance based on approval for a different program…so if you scam your way into a single program you are automatically eligible for others without any scrutiny. These structures invite fraud.

Some or most of that is probably true.

The WaPo Dies In Darkness

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a sad day at the WaPo:

The Washington Post told staffers today that it was moving forward with a sweeping round of layoffs that was part of a “broad strategic reset” of the storied newspaper, which will include eliminating the sports desk, severely cutting back on its international coverage, dismantling its books section, and restructuring its local news team.

The WaPo had a sports desk?

More:

However, after emails were sent to staffers on Wednesday morning, it is expected that roughly one-third of staff — about 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom — will be laid off, with some staffers saying that this was a “bloodbath”.

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” the Post’s former executive editor Marty Baron said Wednesday. “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

Now more than ever we need the WaPo’s propaganda, Baron seems to think. After all, the NY Times, The New Yorker, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, the AP, and about a thousand other pro-left news outlets can hardly be expected to go it alone.

Speaking of the AP, here’s a sorrowful meditation by Dan Perry, a former editor at the AP, on what’s going on at the WaPo and why:

We faced a test over the past thirty years: Did we educate ourselves to value truth (and civility and justice and progress)? Do we care enough to pay enough to keep the machinery of reliable information going — the way we do for beer and sneakers? And guns in dumb places and guaranteed healthcare in smarter ones? Turns out that we did not.

“Reliable information” – he’s referring to the WaPo as a purveyor of reliable information. The irony could not be greater.

More:

People did not subscribe to The Washington Post because it was “digitally savvy.” They subscribed because it was authoritative, relentless, surprising, and serious. They subscribed because it had foreign correspondents who knew their regions, investigative reporters who knew their institutions, and editors who knew when to say no.

Actually, people subscribed to the WaPo because it told them what they wanted to hear, and what they wanted to hear was that Trump was evil and ultimately that he was in prison. The latter never happened, Bezos tried to make the paper slightly less leftist, and it lost some of the audience to which it had been catering – and began cratering.

Perry adds:

… [Bezos seemed to have] a belief that enforced “even-handedness” would broaden the audience and stabilize revenue. It did the opposite. Subscribers left in droves and trust eroded, with nary a Trumpist jumping on board. The Post lost identity at the moment it most needed clarity. People do not subscribe to legacy institutions for timid neutrality; they subscribe for intellectual confidence and moral seriousness.

As I said, they subscribe for confirmation of their already-existing belief system. But I think Perry is right that becoming a bit moe fair and balanced was never going to increase the WaPo’s revenue.

Completely foreseeable result of the Epstein files dump

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Mike Plaiss.”]

From an editorial in the WSJ:

The Justice Department’s release of the so-called Epstein files has gone pretty much as skeptics warned. The feds published another three million pages on Friday. Such investigatory materials are usually kept private to protect innocent victims and witnesses—a lesson that Congress will now relearn at their expense.

Though the Justice Department sought to redact sensitive information, Congress mandated disclosure in 30 days. The Journal reports that last week’s documents initially failed to black out the names of at least 43 victims of Jeffrey Epstein, “including many who haven’t shared their identities publicly or were minors when they were abused by the notorious sex offender.” Some of their addresses or email addresses were posted.

The files also included “dozens of unredacted nude images,” showing the faces and bodies of “young women or possibly teenagers,” the New York Times said. The Justice Department scrambled to fix the oversights. “You’re talking about pieces of paper that stack from the ground to two Eiffel Towers,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News. “We knew that there would be mistakes.”

Meantime, heinous accusations are circulating against prominent people, without any evidence they’re true. Since Epstein died in 2019, prosecutors have had time to chase real leads. The Epstein emails that show elites privately cozying up to a wealthy sex offender are embarrassing, but the government isn’t supposed to be in the business of posting scandalous raw evidence without a verifiable criminal case.

And yet this is what way too many people demanded. And now anyone who had dealings with Epstein is fodder for gossip and incorrect assumptions. Some are completely innocent. Some did smarmy and embarrassing but legal things. Casting the first stone is often so much fun, though, and good for clicks.

As Republican Representative Clay Higgins said when he voted to not release these files (apparently the only member of Congress to do so): the release “abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure” and “will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt.”

The only good result I can see is that it should shut down demands for more – although there probably are many people who, disappointed in the evidence of actual crimes, think there’s still a big coverup and more files exist that would really implicate the elites, the Jews, or whomever is their particular target du jour.

I don’t like any of this, and I’ve written as much many times before (a typical example of such posts of mine can be found here).

Victor Davis Hanson health update

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Kate.”]

I want to call attention to this announcement from VDH:

… [H]ere is a brief update concerning my current temporary absence.

As I wrote, the removal of a cancerous lung mucinous adenoma carcinoma along with the lower right lung lobe roughly a month ago was successful.

But a post-op aneurism/bleed soon developed. That required a quick second reentry operation into the lung to stop the hemorrhaging—adding considerable time under anesthesia and requiring about five blood transfusions.

As a result, over the last 30 days, I developed low red blood counts, fatigue, and bouts of arterial fibrillation. All that has sort of slowed my recovery.

This type of nonsmoker’s lung cancer has a rare genetic/mutation profile. And it seems to recur about 40% of the time in the general lung area—even when, as in my case, the removed and biopsied lymph nodes, along with adjacent vascular/pleural samples, were all negative.

He adds that chemo is only slightly effective against the type of cancer he has, and he hasn’t yet decided whether he’ll do it. It certainly sounds as though he’s been through the mill.

The bottom line is that I’m hoping to come back as soon as possible. But I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back to near normal.

In the meantime, I hope to post things now and then on days when I feel better.

Sincerely—and again thanks to everyone!

Prayers and best wishes for healing go out to him.

NOTE: I’ll add that I have a very good friend who’s undergoing treatment for a cancer with a poor prognosis. Very distressing. I’m in that time of life when such news becomes more and more common. Many of you probably are, too.

Billie Eilish: “no one is illegal on stolen land”

The New Neo Posted on by

The story:

Pop star Billie Eilish has been hit with calls to either return her $3 million Los Angeles mansion to a Native American tribe or welcome migrants inside following her controversial Grammys declaration.

The 24-year-old singer won a Grammy for her hit song Wildflower on Sunday, but it was her acceptance speech that got the country talking.

‘As grateful as I feel, I honestly don’t feel like I need to say anything but that no one is illegal on stolen land,’ Eilish said, referencing the colonization of the Americas by Europeans.

As she stood alongside her brother Finneas, who co-wrote and produced the song, Eilish continued to address the ongoing immigration raids going on across the US.

‘It’s just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now, and I just feel really hopeful in this room, and I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter, and the people matter,’ she said.

She concluded her brief but impassioned speech by shouting, ‘And f*** ICE, that’s all I’m gonna say. Sorry!’

Charming.

And I would have thought that, if the land is stolen, then everyone would be illegal except the original owners. But I also thought that native tribes didn’t have a concept of land ownership back then. This says as much:

The Native American concept of land ownership differs significantly from that of the European settlers who colonized the Americas or their descendants in that land could not be owned, only stewarded and lived with. The Earth is understood by Native Americans as a living, sentient being, and, therefore, no one can claim ownership.

To Native Americans, the Earth is one’s relative, requiring respect and care, as are all the animals and plant life the land supports. The definition of one’s ‘relatives’ encompasses all living things, not just the members of one’s family, and so, just as one would not claim to ‘own’ a relative, one cannot own the land; one can only act as a steward in caring for it. The European settlers’ understanding of the land was quite different …

The Tongva tribe had this to say to Eilish, however:

‘As the First People of the greater Los Angeles basin, we do understand that her home is situated in our ancestral land,’ they stated, adding that the A-lister has not reached out to the tribe herself.

‘Eilish has not contacted our tribe directly regarding her property, we do value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country,’ the spokesperson continued.

Well, Eilish already stated that no one is illegal on stolen land, so that would include her as not being illegal. However, she seems to think this guy is illegal:

… [T]he Birds of a Feather performer obtained a restraining order against a man who she said was stalking her and threatening her family and friends in 2023.

A man named Shawn Christopher McIntyre was ordered by a court to keep a distance of a minimum of 100 yards from Eilish, 21, her family and her friend Zoe Donahoe, TMZ reported, citing court docs. obtained a restraining order against a man who she said was stalking her and threatening her family and friends in 2023.

I wouldn’t ordinarily pay attention to the words of Eilish at the Grammys (or anywhere, really). But this was too ironic – and too typical of leftist celebrities – to ignore.

The shutdown …

The New Neo Posted on by

… appears to be over. If it ever happened at all:

What shutdown? It turns out that large parts of the federal government were “show down” for the past three days.

Funding for Homeland Security has been approved for the next two weeks and the rest is fully funded (at bloated levels) through the end of September.

Chuck Schumer says voter ID is Jim Crow

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course he does:

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday condemned legislation requiring ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote as “nothing more than Jim Crow 2.0.”

Probably more like Jim Crow 2000.0, since the Democrats are fond of calling nearly everything the GOP proposes “Jim Crow.”

So, how would a person prove citizenship under the SAVE Act as proposed? If you listen to the left, “millions” couldn’t comply even though they are citizens:

The SAVE Act would require all Americans to prove their citizenship with documentation unavailable to millions and upend the way every American citizen registers to vote.

The article then goes on and on about passports, as though that’s the way it needs to be done, and although it’s already said birth certificates are fine. It mentions that real IDs wouldn’t work for the purpose.

But what does the legislation actually say? This:

As used in this Act, the term ‘documentary proof of United States citizenship’ means, with respect to an applicant for voter registration, any of the following:

“(1) A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.

“(2) A valid United States passport.

“(3) The applicant’s official United States military identification card, together with a United States military record of service showing that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.

“(4) A valid government-issued photo identification card issued by a Federal, State or Tribal government showing that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.

“(5) A valid government-issued photo identification card issued by a Federal, State or Tribal government other than an identification described in paragraphs (1) through (4), but only if presented together with one or more of the following:

“(A) A certified birth certificate issued by a State, a unit of local government in a State, or a Tribal government which—

“(i) was issued by the State, unit of local government, or Tribal government in which the applicant was born;

“(ii) was filed with the office responsible for keeping vital records in the State;

“(iii) includes the full name, date of birth, and place of birth of the applicant;

“(iv) lists the full names of one or both of the parents of the applicant;

“(v) has the signature of an individual who is authorized to sign birth certificates on behalf of the State, unit of local government, or Tribal government in which the applicant was born;

“(vi) includes the date that the certificate was filed with the office responsible for keeping vital records in the State; and

“(vii) has the seal of the State, unit of local government, or Tribal government that issued the birth certificate.

“(B) An extract from a United States hospital Record of Birth created at the time of the applicant’s birth which indicates that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.

“(C) A final adoption decree showing the applicant’s name and that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.

“(D) A Consular Report of Birth Abroad of a citizen of the United States or a certification of the applicant’s Report of Birth of a United States citizen issued by the Secretary of State.

“(E) A Naturalization Certificate or Certificate of Citizenship issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security or any other document or method of proof of United States citizenship issued by the Federal government pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

“(F) An American Indian Card issued by the Department of Homeland Security with the classification ‘KIC’.”.

A person can still register on election day, too, if a state allows it and the person provides the documentation.

Plus, there’s also this, which Schumer and the rest of the left seem to leave out:

“(i) IN GENERAL.—Subject to any relevant guidance adopted by the Election Assistance Commission, each State shall establish a process under which an applicant who cannot provide documentary proof of United States citizenship under paragraph (1) may, if the applicant signs an attestation under penalty of perjury that the applicant is a citizen of the United States and eligible to vote in elections for Federal office, submit such other evidence to the appropriate State or local official demonstrating that the applicant is a citizen of the United States and such official shall make a determination as to whether the applicant has sufficiently established United States citizenship for purposes of registering to vote in elections for Federal office in the State.

“(ii) AFFIDAVIT REQUIREMENT.—If a State or local official makes a determination under clause (i) that an applicant has sufficiently established United States citizenship for purposes of registering to vote in elections for Federal office in the State, such determination shall be accompanied by an affidavit developed under clause (iii) signed by the official swearing or affirming the applicant sufficiently established United States citizenship for purposes of registering to vote.

Requiring ID and proof of citizenship in order to vote is a popular proposal:

Despite the ongoing divide between elected Republicans and Democrats over requiring photo I.D. to vote, a whopping 86% of Americans support it.

The poll comes just days from the presidential election with voting underway across the country.

Support varied by political party, with 98% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats, and 84% of Independents supporting requiring photo I.D. to vote.

Another 83% of Americans support “requiring people who are registering to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship.” By party, 96% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats and 84% of Independents agree.

This is a very high level of support indeed.

Noem says ICE in Minneapolis will be issued body cameras

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m surprised this hadn’t already occurred:

“Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis,” Noem wrote.

“As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” she wrote.

Bodycams have generally had a clarifying effect on disputes over the actions of law enforcement, and often exonerate the officers.

It’s not clear whether the Border Patrol agents involved in the Pretti shooting had bodycams. The relevant statement is: “Investigators have video from at least four Border Patrol agents on the scene who were wearing body cameras, said DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.” Read that carefully and you’ll notice it doesn’t say whether any of the officers in the group clustered around Pretti were the same ones wearing the cameras, or whether it was other nearby officers.

NOTE: When a state cooperates with ICE or Border Patrol, it tends to go smoothly:

ICE announces the arrests of 650 illegal aliens in West Virginia as part of an operation with cooperation from local law enforcement via the 287(g) program. Per ICE, those arrested have convictions for child sex abuse, drug possession and endangering the welfare of children.

What’s the 287(g) program? It’s when local and state officers carry out the arrests, supervised by ICE.

The two Border Patrol agents who shot Pretti …

The New Neo Posted on by

… have Hispanic names and are probably Hispanic. This is not surprising; I’ve noticed before that many border agents are Hispanic. It makes sense, not only because the Hispanic population is large in the areas involved, but because, as the article notes:

Thus, the influx of illegal aliens from Latin American countries has put enormous pressure on the legal communities of Latin Americans. Not only are there more people fighting for the same resources (housing, jobs, and goods), but there are also more criminals, and statistical data shows that most criminals stay local. When the illegal immigrant drug dealers, pedophiles, and murderers come to town, they prey on their own.

But no doubt the left considers the two “white Hispanics,” which is what they called George Zimmerman.

Nor is “Hispanic” a race or even a single ethnicity, although it’s been regarded in the US as one for years.