fraud

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News/Politics 11-3-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Let’s hope they’re accurate.

From FoxNews  “Republican Senate candidates are pulling away in the final days of key races, according to polls released this weekend.

Republicans are either leading in Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana or will likely win runoff elections, according to a NBC/Marist poll released Sunday.

In addition, the Republican nominee in Iowa, Joni Ernst, now has a 7-point lead over Democratic challenger Rep. Bruce Braley, according to a Des Moines Register poll released Saturday.

Most polls have shown until now that the four races have essentially been deadlocked in the closing weeks.”

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2. The govt. made 20 billion in purchases this year that it’s allowed to keep secret from taxpayers.

From NBC/Washington  “The federal government has spent at least $20 billion in taxpayer money this year on items and services that it is permitted to keep secret from the public, according to an investigation by the News4 I-Team.

The purchases, known among federal employees as “micropurchases,” are made by some of the thousands of agency employees who are issued taxpayer-funded purchase cards. The purchases, in most cases, remain confidential and are not publicly disclosed by the agencies. A sampling of those purchases, obtained by the I-Team via the Freedom of Information Act, reveals at least one agency used those cards to buy $30,000 in Starbucks Coffee drinks and products in one year without having to disclose or detail the purchases to the public.

A series of other recent purchases, reviewed by internal government auditors, include wasteful and inappropriate purchases by government employees — including a gym membership and JC Penney clothing — that were not detected or stopped until after the purchase was completed.

The I-Team’s findings have been the subject of a Congressional hearing and created scrutiny from taxpayer watchdogs for the Department of Homeland Security, which made the Starbucks purchases and declines to publicly detail them.”

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3. Here’s more waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money.

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4. Not shocking to anyone who’s been connecting the dots.

From TheDailyCaller  “The deadly EV-D68 enterovirus epidemic, which struck thousands of kids this fall, was likely propelled through America by President Barack Obama’s decision to allow tens of thousands of Central Americans across the Texas border, according to a growing body of genetic and statistical evidence.

The evidence includes admissions from top health officials that the epidemic included multiple strains of the virus, and that it appeared simultaneously in multiple independent locations.

The question can be settled if federal researchers study the genetic fingerprint of the EV-D68 viruses that first hit kids in Colorado, Missouri and Illinois to see if they are close relatives to the EV-D68 viruses found in Central America.”

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5. This is how not to do it. Let people with no military experience micromanage military decisions.

From TheDailyBeast  “Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army.

As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained within policy limits. The National Security Council has given precise instructions on which rebels can be engaged, who can be trained, and what exactly those fighters will do when they return to Syria. Most of the rebels to be trained by the U.S. will never be sent to fight against ISIS.

Making matters worse, military officers and civilian Pentagon leaders tell The Daily Beast, is the ISIS war’s decision-making process, run by National Security Adviser Susan Rice. It’s been manic and obsessed with the tiniest of details. Officials talk of sudden and frequent meetings of the National Security Council and the so-called Principals Committee of top defense, intelligence, and foreign policy officials (an NSC and three PCs in one week this month); a barrage of questions from the NSC to the agencies that create mountains of paperwork for overworked staffers; and NSC insistence on deciding minor issues even at the operational level.

“We are getting a lot of micromanagement from the White House. Basic decisions that should take hours are taking days sometimes,” one senior defense official told The Daily Beast.”

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News/Politics 8-9-13

What’s interesting in the news today?

First up, I can see a judge issuing a gag order to witnesses. What I can’t see is why you threaten the families with loss of benefits if they don’t play along too. A military judge in a court-martial has no such authority over civilians. So where did the order to families not to talk to the press come from? DoD, or the White House?

From RedState  “Autumn Manning, wife of Army Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning who was wounded in the Ft. Hood terror attack, is speaking out on Twitter. Manning claims that the Department of Defense has “slapped victims of violence with gag orders” and is preventing them to discuss denial of benefits and other developments in the wake of the attack.”

“Why would the DOD gag families, especially those who aren’t serving thus not obligated to comply?”

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The military won’t be the only govt agency used for social experiments by the Obama admin. Introducing the new and improved HUD.

From FoxNews  “In a move some claim is tantamount to social engineering, the Department of  Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds  to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change  those it deems discriminatory. 

The policy is called, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” It will  require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single  neighborhood and try to remedy it.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan unveiled the federal rule at the NAACP  convention in July.”

“Data from this discrimination database would be used with zoning laws, housing  finance policy, infrastructure planning and transportation to alleviate alleged  discrimination and segregation.”

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If you like that one, you’ll love this one.

From CNSNews  “Secretary of State John Kerry announced Wednesday the formation of the Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives, which will be headed by Shaun Casey, a former religion advisor to President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and a liberal professor who last year touted the end of ‘civil religion’ in the United States.

“I, frankly, am glad American civil religion is dying,” Casey said at a discussion last year at the Center for American Progress focused on “God and Politics” in the last presidential election.”

“Kerry cited the Bible’s New Testament in describing the new office’s mission, which he said would seek “common ground” between “all religions.”

“One of my favorite passages from the Scripture sums up what Shaun and I think this effort is really all about,” Kerry said. “It’s a familiar Gospel of Mark in which Jesus says to his disciples, ‘For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for the many.’”

And there you have it. I’m not sure exactly what IT is, but there it is.

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Additional indictments from the Boston bombing case.

From Reuters  “A U.S. grand jury on Thursday indicted two students from Kazakhstan on obstruction of justice charges, alleging they helped hide evidence related to the April Boston marathon bombing that killed three and injured 264.

Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, both 19, were college friends of surviving bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.”

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Next up, “Phony scandals?” Depends who you ask.

From FoxNews  “Benghazi. Snooping on reporters. The IRS and NSA. The White  House dismisses them as phony and fake scandals. Americans do not.

A  Fox News national poll released Thursday finds that 78 percent of voters  think the questions over the administration’s handling of the terrorist attack  on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi should be taken seriously. Just 17  percent call it a phony scandal.”

“Meanwhile, 69  percent of voters say the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance  of everyday Americans is serious, while 26 percent call that a fake scandal.”

And there’s more. Looks like a message fail for Obama and Dems all the way around.

Oh, and since we’re talking about them scandals…..

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted..

In closed door testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee, the unidentified IRS agent said requests for special tax status from Tea Party groups is being forced into a special “secondary screening” because the agency has yet to come up with new guidance on how to judge the tax status of the groups.”

“In a transcript from the committee provided to Secrets, a Ways & Means investigator asked: “If you saw — I am asking this currently, if today if a Tea Party case, a group — a case from a Tea Party group came in to your desk, you reviewed the file and there was no evidence of political activity, would you potentially approve that case? Is that something you would do?”

“The agent said, “At this point I would send it to secondary screening, political advocacy.” The committee staffer then said, “So you would treat a Tea Party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application. Is that right?” The agent admitted, “Based on my current manager’s direction, uh-huh.”

Phony. Sure. 🙄

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Waste. Fraud. Abuse.

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “A Maryland woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges related to setting up at least 15 false businesses in six states that received government contracts despite often being registered to people who did not exist.”

“The conspirators typically operated under a particular business name for a period of six to 12 months until the business was either disqualified from the FedBid marketplace or was otherwise burdened with lawsuits or liens,” the plea bargain said.

“The conspirators initially used their true names and addresses to register their businesses, but later attempted to conceal their true identities by using aliases to register the businesses and by renting commercial mail box store fronts.””

“The case illustrates how little federal officials know about where goods and services they purchase come from, with one Whitehead firm selling ammunition to the Army, according to government contracting records, thus raising questions about whether bullets of dubious quality wound up in soldiers’ hands.”

And it just gets worse from there.

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Lastly today, 2 abortion stories. First Wendy Davis, and the ignorance from Dems like her in the abortion debate. And of course you can’t talk about that without mentioning the media who enables it.

From HotAir   “This spring and summer has seen the media bias in full bloom on abortion.  The national media couldn’t be bothered to cover the trial of Kermit Gosnell, which they initially dismissed as a “local” news story despite its potential impact on the national debate over abortion, while they thundered down to Florida as a herd to cover the George Zimmerman trial … and to Arizona for the Jodi Arias trial, whose national implications were apparently “pretty girl kills boyfriend and denies it.””

“When Texas followed up on the Gosnell grand jury report to better regulate abortion mills to ensure that they operated as ambulatory surgical clinics and limited abortions to 20 weeks, the media only took an interest in the woman who tried to block the bill that had support from 62% of Texans and 61% of Texas women.  The same national media who couldn’t be bothered to report on the Gosnell horror without being shamed into it — and then mostly focused on whether or not it was a real news story at all — hailed Wendy Davis as a heroine for her opposition. In fact, they gave Davis three times as much coverage in three weeks as they gave the Gosnell trial in eight weeks.

Oddly, though, they never actually pressed Davis to explain why she opposed regulating abortion clinics, given the horrors of the unregulated Gosnell clinic.  When John McCormack of the Weekly Standard asked her about the majority support of women for late-term abortion bans in light of Gosnell, Davis replied that she was mainly ignorant of the Gosnell case, but claimed women overall were ignorant of the lack of risk involved.”

“Despite frequently mocking anti-abortion activists as anti-science know-nothings, abortion rights absolutists are the ones who play fast and loose with the facts of abortion. Because they are so rarely asked to defend their positions, Davis and her ilk apparently don’t feel the need to be informed.  Follow-up questions to their strange and often empirically false statements are almost nonexistent, while offensive or misinformed comments from GOP back benchers are greeted with full-scale media hysteria.”

And the second is here. I’d be surprised if you’ve seen anything about this on the so-called news.

From LifeNews  “Leading pro-life advocates marched in downtown Washington, D.C. to the doorstep of ABC News’ Washington bureau to accuse the network and other mainstream media outlets of bias and censorship on abortion.

Fifty six days after the grisly trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell began, ABC broke its self-imposed blackout and finally offered coverage.

Lila Rose, the head of Live Action, which coordinated the event, said “Enough is enough. It’s time to report the news. It’s time to stop censoring the news.”

“She was joined by pro-life leaders like Jill Stanek, Ryan Bomberger and Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life.”

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