The Democrats included huge cash handouts for wealthy constituents in predominantly liberal areas in their emergency response package.
By • Foundation for Economic Education
At some point, when the election chaos is finally settled, Congress will likely turn to passing another COVID-19 stimulus/relief bill. (Despite the last one being plagued by rampant fraud and dysfunction). One starting point for negotiations will be the “HEROES Act,” a $2.2 trillion bill the House passed in October on a party-line vote by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats.
One of the most significant aspects of the HEROES Act is that it allocates nearly $700 billion in federal money for state, local, and tribal governments.
Proponents say this gives localities the funds they need to pay emergency responders and fund programs necessary to protect their communities. Critics point out that much of this money is used to “bail out” blue states that were already mismanaging their budgets and running up large unfunded pension programs before the pandemic.
Indeed, the left-leaning Brookings Institution has projected that “state and local government revenues will decline $155 billion in 2020, $167 billion in 2021, and $145 billion in 2022.” Simple math shows us that the CARES Act gives states and localities hundreds of billions more in federal money than they are actually projected to lose due to pandemic-related decreases in revenue.
This alone should be a red flag. Yet a new analysis also reveals that Pelosi and her fellow “progressives” snuck millions of dollars in cash for some of the nation’s wealthiest zip codes into their emergency COVID-19 package.
Watchdogs from OpenTheBooks.com inspected the fine print of the HEROES Act and found that it allocates $350 million to the 50 richest communities in America. The average annual income in these areas ranged from $262,988 to $525,324.
“It’s unclear why such wealthy neighborhoods need so much money to weather the storm,” Adam Andrzejewski of OpenTheBooks.com wrote.“Should American taxpayers from lower-income areas be subsidizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous?
Some might reasonably look at a figure like $350 million and conclude that, in the context of a $2.2 trillion bill, it is a relatively small amount of money. But we mustn’t forget that this figure is only looking at a tiny sample size. It is not all the money this bill allocates to wealthy zip codes, just a snapshot.
We can extrapolate from this figure that the HEROES Act would dole out many hundreds of millions if not billions more to other wealthy towns and cities.
It’s not even the only provision of the bill that can be fairly characterized as a handout for the rich. The package also includes items such as student debt relief, which further burdens cash-strapped taxpayers yet only helps a relatively well-educated and well-off subset of society.
But wait: Aren’t Democrats supposed to be the progressive party fighting for the working class? That’s certainly what their rhetoric would suggest. Yet the Democrats included cash handouts for wealthy constituents in predominantly liberal areas such as Wellesley, Mass., Malibu, California, and Old Greenwich, Conn. in their emergency response package nonetheless.
This offers another painful reminder that government officials—no matter their professed partisan or ideological principles—will always and inevitably end up wielding their power in a manner prone to favoritism and clientelism.
“There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive,” Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote. “In many fields of the administration of interventionist measures, favoritism simply cannot be avoided.”
Humans are fallible beings—and power corrupts. This is why, from tax loopholes to crony regulations to spending bills, sweeping government interventions will always end up skewing in favor of powerful constituencies. However, when power is left to the individual level rather than government, that decentralization helps limit abuses.
It’s not a matter of electing the right people. Fundamentally, progressive and conservative government officials alike face the same incentive structures.
The only way to really prevent the abuse of government power and expenditure of taxpayer resources in favor of the well-off and well-connected is to limit the scope of the government itself.
By • American Action news
Thousands of ballots appear to have been lost in heavily Republican Butler County, PA., leaving officials confused and working with the U.S. Postal Service to retrieve them, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Friday.
“Over the last week and a half, the Bureau of Elections has received thousands of calls and emails from voters saying they did not receive their mail-in or absentee ballots,” a statement from the county said. “The postal service is maintaining daily contact with our Elections Bureau and is aware of the situation.”
Estimates on the number of missing ballots run into the tens of thousands. According to published reports, the county Elections Bureau mailed out nearly 40,000 with just about half returned as of Thursday.
A spokesperson for the postal service said in a statement to KDKA-TV, “Regarding mail sorting and delivery in Butler County, the Postal Service is unaware of any significant delays or issues and is in regular contact with the Board of Election as we work to locate and deliver ballots as they are presented to us.”
County officials said they would focus on the challenges of providing voters who may not have received mail-in ballots with other options to vote in the upcoming election rather than spend time on finding the ballots that have apparently gone missing. They also that all returned ballots would be recorded on the county web site within the next 48 hours so voters should be able to check if their mail-in ballots were received.
Neighboring Westmoreland County has had similar troubles with ballots this week, the paper said, but numbers are improving. County officials said Friday evening that 52,729 mail-in or absentee ballots have been returned out of the 75,642 that were sent to voters.
Tuesday was the last day for Pennsylvania voters to apply for an absentee or mail-in ballot. Nonetheless, the paper said, a steady stream of voters visited the Butler County Courthouse Friday afternoon to drop their completed mail-in ballots off in person.
“My wife and I decided to drop them off today because we don’t think it would get in on time if we had mailed them,” Anthony Grossi, of Butler, told the paper.
Anyone whose ballot is missing may, the county suggested, go to the Bureau of Elections and vote in person. The office will be open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday and 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday. Or they may vote on Tuesday at their local polling place.
Joseph Biden is the Manchurian candidate
By • DrLarryOnline.com
In the 1962 movie, The Manchurian Candidate, the plot depicts a complicated plot by which the chosen candidate of the Communist enemy of the United States is to be elected President of the United States of America. This candidate will be compelled to execute every instruction of the Communists because he is the victim of numerous threats of blackmail and assassination by his controllers.
The publication of the 87 page document entitled “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs U.S. Senate Committee on Finance Majority Staff Report” (See Hunter Biden, Burisma and Corruption) on September 23, 2020 indicates that Joseph Biden would find himself in the same position as The Manchurian Candidate.
While this report has been ignored by the press and therefore the entire electorate as a partisan attack on the Democratic nominee, the information it contains is too detailed and specific, including names, dates, connections, and even checks with exact amounts to the penny, to be written off as fictional. It is precisely the type of detailed accusation which has always been lacking in the Democrats’ “Russian conspiracy” accusations against President Trump.
So, what are these accusations? The report traces the history of Robert Hunter Biden’s association with literally dozens of foreign countries with the effect of controlling billions of dollars supplied by Ukrainian, Chinese and other foreign sources and personally receiving millions of dollars, which he shared with his Uncle James Biden (Joe’s brother) and James’ wife Sara.
The most famous of Hunter Biden’s deals was his appointment to the Board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company owned by a notorious oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky. The only known asset the younger Biden seems to have brought to the energy company’s Board was his relationship with the sitting Vice President, who had just been given the responsibility of directing all U.S. Ukrainian policy.
Hunter’s vehicle for this deal was Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm. The firm was owned by three partners, Biden, John Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, and Heinz’s college roommate, Devon Archer, who was the Managing Partner in the firm. Biden and Archer joined the Burisma Board and Heinz left the firm in 2015.
There are interesting facts surrounding this appointment. On April 14, 2014, Managing Partner of Rosemount Seneca Partners Archer met with Vice President Joe Biden. Five days later, Biden flew to the Ukraine. The Report continues,
“The day after (Biden’s) visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. Six days later, on April 28, British officials seized $23 million from the London bank accounts of Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the Board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.” (p. 3)
The rest of the story is even more complicated and appalling. But most of all, the connections of the Bidens with China are important. The actions of the former Vice President are well known to the public. The inter-connections between the Bidens and U.S actions are not well known. To quote again from the Report :
Conclusions
1.The USA is currently in a contest with Communist China which will determine the fate of the world for at least the rest of this century. Already the Chinese have obtained enough technological knowledge from America’s leading-edge companies to challenge us in what is becoming a new weapons race. Much of this technology transfer was facilitated by America’s foreign policy which was motivated by globalism and facilitated by digitalization.
2.We now have a new administration which is dedicated to reversing that posture and acknowledging the competition. How that competition avoids a war down the road is based on the potential of one of these countries so overwhelming the other that that nation withdraws from the contest. This is the strategy that won the last Cold War. Any softening of our intent at this stage will lead to certain defeat.
3.Giving control of the federal government to the Democrat Party, led by a man who is not only sympathetic to our enemy but is subject to blackmail and intimidation by that enemy is to commit national suicide.
4.The charges made by the Senate committees must be thoroughly investigated and appropriate actions taken. There is simply too much smoke for there not to be a fire.
If all this makes you unutterably saddened as an American, you are not alone.
By • The Federalist
President Trump has repeatedly warned of potential voter fraud associated with mass mail-in ballots for the November election, but a bigger threat might be sheer incompetence. Can we really rely on the U.S. Postal Service to handle a nationwide influx of mail-in ballots beginning next month?
So far, there’s not much reason for confidence. Last week in New York City, the Board of Elections threw out more than 84,000 mail-in ballots for the June 23 Democratic primary. That was out of a total of nearly 319,000 mail-in ballots, which means about 21 percent of all mail-in ballots were invalidated.
The New York Post reported, “One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects.” What’s more, it took six weeks to declare a winner in two closely watched Democratic congressional primary races, largely because of delays associated with a surge of mail-in votes.
Elsewhere around the country, similar problems are cropping up. In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballot problems kept tens of thousands of residents from voting in the June primaries. In California, more than 100,000 mail-in ballots were rejected in the March presidential primary, mostly for missing the postmark and arrival deadlines.
Missing deadlines is turning out to be a real problem. A recent NPR analysis of 2020 mail-in primary ballots found significant rates of rejection because of late arrival. In Virginia, for example, more than 5.6 percent of all primary mail-in ballots were thrown out for arriving after the deadline. The numbers themselves are not large, but in a close election they can make all the difference—after all, Trump won in 2016 because of just 80,000 votes in three key states.
All these problems suggest the Postal Service isn’t prepared to handle an influx of voting by mail this November, as well as the possibility that no winner will be declared on election night because of mail-in ballot delays.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy last week said the Postal Service is expecting “an unprecedented increase in election mail volume due to the pandemic,” yet insisted it “has ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on time in accordance with our delivery standards.”
Based on all the mail-in ballot problems we’ve seen so far this year, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The Postal Service has been bleeding money for a long time—its losses this year reached $1.5 billion, compared to $1.1 billion last year—and the coronavirus pandemic has made things worse as the volume of mail sent by businesses has plummeted. Last month, the Postal Service agreed to a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Treasury Department after congressional negotiations to give the service as much as $25 billion fell through.
DeJoy’s efforts to manage these losses, which include a hiring freeze for leadership positions announced last week, have been denounced by Democrats who sound increasingly like conspiracy theorists. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the Democrat who chairs the committee overseeing the postal service, accused DeJoy of “deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election—an election that hinges on mail-in ballots.”
Democrats complain that DeJoy, a Republican and a Trump supporter, is a “partisan” postmaster general, and that his efforts to shore up the Postal Service are really a ploy to steal the election.
But to the extent the Postal Service has a political bias, it certainly isn’t DeJoy’s fault—and in fact, it goes in the other direction. Last month, the American Postal Workers Union’s National Executive Board endorsed Joe Biden, saying in a statement that Trump is “a serious threat to our decent postal jobs, our unions and to the right of the people to a public Postal Service.”
That’s not to say there’s a conspiracy in the other direction, that Postal Service workers are going to mishandle mail-in ballots on purpose to hurt Trump. Only that relying on a failing government agency like the Postal Service to ensure the integrity of a presidential election might not be a good idea, especially given all the problems we’ve already seen with mail-in ballots in primary elections this year.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may have a boring name, but it has a very important job: It measures U.S. temperatures. Unfortunately, it seems to be a captive of the global warming religion. Its data are fraudulent.
What do we mean by fraudulent? How about this: NOAA has made repeated “adjustments” to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate.
Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing — lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in the recent present. Continue reading
Commissioners were instructed not to reveal $5 million fine until day after controversial Lifeline expansion vote
by Lachlan Markay • Washington Free Beacon
Tom Wheeler/AP
Federal regulators were instructed to keep a massive fraud investigation under wraps until a day after a controversial vote to expand a program that was allegedly used to bilk taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars, one those regulators claims.
The Federal Communications Commission on Friday announced that it would seek $51 million in damages from a cell phone company that allegedly defrauded the federal Lifeline program of nearly $10 million.
The commission’s five members unanimously backed the Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL), but Republican commissioner Ajit Pai parted from his colleagues in a partial dissent. According to Pai, he and other commissioners were told not to reveal the details of its investigation until April 1, a day after the FCC voted to expand the Lifeline program. Continue reading
Let’s not shy away from what the Secret Service actually was up to in the matter of its illegal spying on Representative Jason Chaffetz: conspiracy to commit blackmail against a member of Congress.
Representative Chaffetz has been investigating the scandal-plagued protective agency — the habitual drunkenness and whoring of its agents, among other things — when Secret Service personnel improperly accessed his protected records in a hunt for dirt. The aim of this was made clear by assistant director Ed Lowery, who wrote to assistant director Faron Paramore: “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out.”
Critics are saying that the agency’s brass — at least 18 of them were culpably aware of the plan, and 45 employees illegally viewed the congressman’s information — have violated the Privacy Act. They certainly have, but that is the least of it. They have illegally accessed protected federal records, which is fraud under federal law and carries a ten-year prison sentence. Continue reading
The federal government now runs the insurance market, dictating deadlines, procedures, rates, risk assessments and coverage requirements. It’s gotten so cocky it’s now telling insurers to cover the claims that, by law, they are not required to.
by Charles Krauthammer
The Lie of the year, according to Politifact, is “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” But the story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical Obamacare is – which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place.
Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured. And, mirabile dictu, not costing the government a dime. Continue reading
From the Washington Post: “… President Obama ended up with three of the most misleading claims of the year. But, despite the urging of some readers, his statement that “I didn’t set a red line” on Syria is not among them ….
This memorable promise by President Obama backfired on him when the Affordable Care Act went into effect and millions of Americans started receiving cancellation notices. As we explained, part of the reason for so many cancellations is because of an unusually early (March 23, 2o10) cut-off date for grandfathering plans — and because of tight regulations written by the administration. This was our most popular fact check of the year — and Obama’s pledge also was also named PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year.” Continue reading
If he were a CEO in the private sector, he’d be prosecuted and convicted for such deception.
by Andrew C. McCarthy
If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” How serious was this lie, repeated by Barack Obama with such beguiling regularity? Well, how would the Justice Department be dealing with it if it had been uttered by, say, the president of an insurance company rather than the president of the United States?
Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime. In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer. Continue reading
by John Hawkins
When the Democrats were trying to sell Obamacare to the public, they told us that because of Barack Obama’s magical health care elixir, Americans are going to live forever, in perfect health for free while unicorns will tote them back and forth to magical fairy doctors who will cure all their ills with pixie dust. Obamacare is going to be superior to the current health care system in every way and anything people heard to the contrary was obviously a lie cooked up by Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party to hurt poor people.
It sounded great.
Of course, it also sounds great when a Nigerian prince offers to give you millions of dollars to help him get money into the United States. Unfortunately, those Nigerian princes with the funny names won’t make you any richer, just as Presidents with funny names won’t improve your health care. They’ll just tell you lies like these.
1) Obamacare will cut the cost of your health care. If only. When Obamacare goes into effect next year, many Americans can expect steep increases in the cost of health care.
President Obama (promised)…that the cost of insurance would go down “by $2,500 per family per year.” …In fact, the average 25 and 40-year-old will pay double under Obamacare what they would need to pay today, based on rates posted at eHealthInsurance.com (NASDAQ:EHTH). More specifically, for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoker, the average Obamacare “bronze” exchange plan in California will cost between 64 and 117 percent more than the cheapest five plans on eHealth. For 40-year-old male non-smokers, it’s between 73 and 146 percent more. Continue reading
Like the falsified story Obama told about his mother, cancer and health insurance, ObamaCare is full of purposeful falsehoods. This is not a new problem with Obama, he’s been doing this – peddling blatant falsehoods on the national stage – since at least 2008. And the mainstream media has largely cheer him on or, at best, slept.
by Mona Charen
Remember President Barack Obama’s mother? Though the airwaves currently echo with his vow “If you like your plan . . .” I keep remembering Obama’s account of his mother being denied coverage by her insurance company as she lay dying of cancer.
The moving and infuriating story was a staple on the 2008 campaign trail. His mother had insurance, he explained, but when she came down with cancer, her insurance company claimed her disease was a “pre-existing condition” and refused to pay for her treatment. In a debate with Sen. John McCain, Obama said: “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”
There would be, if it had been true. Continue reading
by Rich Lowry
At the end of the day, the root of President Obama’s mendacity on ObamaCare was simple: He didn’t dare tell people how the law would work. He couldn’t tell people how the law would work.
Forthrightness was the enemy. It served no useful purpose and could only bring peril, and potentially defeat. It had to be banished. Instead, President Obama made the sale on the basis of dubious blandishments and outright deceptions.
If this is the only way to pass your signature initiative — and a decades-long goal of your party — it ought to give you pause. But Obama was a natural at delivering sweeping and sincere-seeming assurances that just weren’t true. This kind of thing is his métier. Continue reading
ObamaCare Costs Pork
When conservatives pointed out that you couldn’t keep your insurance policy, you couldn’t keep your doctor, and that the government or its panels and boards would decide what treatment will be given and what treatment will be denied (i.e. death panels), the President, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and virtually all of the Democrats in Congress, as well as the mainstream media, howled with outrage and claimed that such talk was absurdly false, patently dishonest, and even racist. Evidence now proves that the conservatives were right on all counts and that the President and his allies were lying or were just plain stupid.
With the cancellation of millions of policies and even the President’s half-hearted “apology,” it is now beyond debate that “if you like your health insurance, you can keep your insurance,” or doctor or hospital is fantastically false. That is no longer debatable. The only question is who knew they were lying and who stupidly repeated the lies of others without actually knowing. Continue reading
by John Crudele
Let me be the first to ask: Did the White House know that employment reports were being falsified?
Last week I reported exclusively that someone at the Census Bureau’s Philadelphia region had been screwing around with employment data. And that person, after he was caught in 2010, claimed he was told to do so by a supervisor two levels up the chain of command.
On top of that, a reliable source whom I haven’t identified said the falsification of employment data by Census was widespread and ongoing, especially around the time of the 2012 election. Continue reading