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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Showing posts with label Fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fraud. Show all posts

Friday, August 14, 2026

Observations From the Back Row

 By Rich Kozlovich

Recently I posted this piece on fraud and government waste, Fraud and Government Waste is Rampant and Ubiquitous, and as I was doing my searches this morning this caught my eye.  Two federal agencies routed taxpayer dollars to terror-linked charities, new reports find saying:

Two federal agencies gave away roughly $2 billion in taxpayer-funded health and humanitarian contracts to charities that watchdogs and a Senate committee have flagged for terror ties, meaning the government's own vetting either missed those records or decided their terrorist-linked status didn't disqualify the groups. .....

The Middle East Forum (MEF) recently reported that 14 terror-linked and extremist organizations, led by CAIR, collected nearly $80 million from HHS through the Refugee Resettlement, Health, and Mosque Renovation grants. Through this fund, the Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) California chapter received the most of any Islamist group, collecting $42.2 million in funding from the HHS to provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees.

I have three questions.  First, how in the world did it become American's responsibility to fund efforts to "provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees"?  Second, why are these terrorist associated groups even to be in this country?  Third, how did these agencies fail to vet them properly?  I can answer all three.  We shouldn't, they shouldn't and the federal government is filled with corrupt Deep Staters.    

As it turns out, this is the tip of the iceberg, as Sharia Financing Is Becoming Government Policy Across America.  

Sharia-compliant finance is being woven into government policy across the United States. Cities have restructured public lending programs to accommodate Islamic prohibitions on interest. States have changed laws and tax treatment for Sharia financing. Federal banking regulators have formally approved Islamic financial structures and explained how existing rules can accommodate them. Here are the government’s own receipts showing how Sharia-compliant finance is being normalized across America.

 In Texas schools are busing kids to mosques in order for them to experience Islam. Why?  "Their teachers wanted them to see a different side of the Muslims, the diversity within our community, and these are brothers and sisters."  So they wanted to have them believe all this "brotherhood" propaganda and ignore the terror, murder, rape, and genocide Islam perpetrates worldwide.  The true  history of Islam is a bloody one far beyond Europe's bloody history.  All anyone needs to understand about Islam are the deaths of 2977 victims of Islam that occurred on September 11, 2001, and whomever organized this needs fired. 

This article appeared at the Issues and Insights web site,  Defund The U.N. Green Climate Fund, saying:

The United Nations GCF is nothing but a racket. “It is neither green nor about climate,” it is “a wasteful fraud,” says David Wojick of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. The fund has received and spent more than “$20 billion to date, with more billions coming.” As if in defiance of the extravagance, Earth’s temperature has refused to respond.  Despite its name, the GCF is simply another vendor of foreign aid............. Unlike USAID, which doubled as a taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for Democrats, the GCF hasn’t been taken down. But it needs to be dismantled, just as its parasitic parent, the United Nations, should be shut down and run out of the country. The world would be better off without this meddlesome, venal, and baleful organization. And its many poisonous tentacles.

Since the corruption of USAID was exposed as a vast wasteland of fraud and abuse the Trump administration ended it.  It also ended it's real function. A slush fund for the Democrats, but now they're claiming as a result of shutting USAID down millions around the world are starving, and it's a lie.  

But the left embraces the first rule of the criminal mind.  Never give up the con.  Cindy McCain, who is the Executive Director of  the World Food Program is telling the Trump administration: ‘We need help’ with food aid." 

If we see starving children most of us will find that unacceptable, and that's the hook they use to reel everyone in.  Helping the needy is a foundational Judaic/Christian moral principle.  But how far should that go?  How long should it go on? How did it become America's responsibility to feed the world?  Why are these nations starving in the first place? How many people in the world should we be feeding?  How many of those millions of dollars were squandered on keeping tyrants in power, versus actually feeding their societies?  I think perhaps Cindy McCain needs to provide some answers to those questions first.  

  1. McCain-Feingold, USAID and the NGO Network
  2. Seven ‘Far-Right’ Candidates Have Won in Latin America Since USAID Was Defunded 
  3. GAO Faults State, USAID For Poor Oversight Of $1.2 Billion China Counter-Influence Effort

I saw this article, Democratic senators demand answers about conditions aboard USS Abraham Lincoln, and it touched a nerve.  I served in the Navy and on one occasion had an extended line period and I can tell you it gets difficult being cooped up in tight spaces working 12 on and 12 off seven days a week, and eating food that's reconstituted, and that was nowhere near as long as what this crew is facing.   I can only imagine how difficult an extended tour of  "more than 250 days" at sea must be like, and I have no doubt about how it's taking a toll in the mental health of the crew.  

Let's face it, just as in the normal world there are those who just can't face adversity as well as others.  I can also say...... this is the military, it's not meant to be a regular job,...... and anyone who joins has to know that. Fortunately, as it stands now another carrier is on it's way to replace the long serving USS Lincoln.  The real question that needs answering is why they weren't they relieved long before this?

Update, 8/18/26:  

  • Somali “Outstanding Refugee” Winner Charged in Sex Trafficking Health Care Fraud By • What does it take to be an ‘outstanding refugee’ in Minnesota?   What does it take to be an ‘outstanding refugee’ in Minnesota? It’s not enough to be involved in Medicaid fraud. Any halfway competent Somali refugee who can invent his or her own health care company can do that.  To be truly outstanding, there also needs to be some sex trafficking allegedly involved.  So let’s honor the truly outstanding refugee achievements of Salman Elhi who raised the bar for Somalis all across Minnesota.......

Thursday, August 13, 2026

Fraud and Government Waste is Rampant and Ubiquitous

By Rich Kozlovich

Fraud permeates everything the left touches, and many of those who profess to be on the right are either silent, complacent or complicit.  Then there are those who are happy about it.  In Godfather II gangster Hyman Roth told Michael Corleone, “Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” 

The mobsters in “The Godfather” set their sights way too low. If they really wanted to make it big time, they should have targeted federal entitlement programs instead of gamblers and drug addicts. Not only does it pay better, but you can count on one political party to look the other way.  The Government Accountability Office (GAO) figures that fraudsters make off with more than $500 billion of federal taxpayer money a year, plus another $184 billion in “improper payments.” That isn’t just bigger than U.S. Steel. That’s five times as big as the entire steel industry.

  1. Treasury Warns of Fraudsters Creating ‘Ghost Students’ to Steal Federal Student Aid.
  2.  Beyond Fraud: Citizen Journalists Unmask Crazy Government Waste
  3. GAO: Federal fraud could exceed $500B annually
  4. GAO Says Fraud Risk High In $1.1T Of State-Run Federal Programs 

Health care costs have skyrocketed in the nation, the cost of health insurance for one can be as high as 10,000 a year.  Make no mistake, a big portion of this was caused by Obamacare, and more by massive levels of fraud.  In one case the Trump administration tracked nearly $300 billion fraud tab of that falls under the domain of the Department of Health and Human Services.  An agency that like all the rest is most likely filled with Deep Staters.  

  1. Daycare centers without children taking in over 100 Million from Medicaid
  2. The fraud and waste of California's $220 billion dollar Medi-Cal program, which are leaving taxpayers with massive runaway costs, and it got so bad the federal government suspended one billion dollars in Medicaid funds to California and to Minnesota.  More here. 
  3. A man in New York stole 19 million in a Medicaid Fraud scheme.  
  4. A man in Atlanta stole over five million from a children's hospital.
  5. In this case over 2000 native Americans ended up either dead or missing in a scheme for criminals to steal could billions from Medicaid.  
  6. Radicals in Wisconsin hiding behind a "nonprofit' scan is in reality protest group that since 2020 has been funded by the "federal government....including from the Department of Justice and state officials."  to the tune of  "$5 million in government funds.  

"For Today’s Democrats, Fraud Is A Feature, Not A Bug"

Its been discovered the left has been faking donations to their fund their political schemes.  ActBlue claims about donors has proven to be troublesome.  From people who said they they've never... ever.. made political donations to a man living in poor conditions having made "7,878 donations worth $93,168".  

“Many of the donors have a high frequency of donations, but low donation amounts,” Corrigan wrote. “These types of financial transactions are often used in money laundering and identity theft crime rings to not arise suspicions with high dollar amount transactions. The victims are chosen carefully because their information is publicly available, and Act Blue already has it.”

 In this case the criminals would be political operatives.  

  1.   Concerns over Ilhan Omar's links to massive fraud explode on new evidence
  2.   Why Are So Many Muslim Migrants Involved in Massive Fraud Schemes?
  3.   Mamdani’s Wife Fundraised for Gaza Then Never Donated the Money 
With fraud at over a half trillion dollars you would might imagine someone would think something needs to be done.  Yet key GAO recommendations are being ignored.  Why?  Because, at least in my opinion, these agencies are filled with Deep Staters and lazy losers, and a Congress that goes on vacation while we're spiraling down a maelstrom of 400 trillion dollars in debt. 
 
There are over 200 programs paid for by the federal government that are run by the states costing 1.2 trillion dollars a year, "and despite their openness to fraud, the government does little to combat it."

Is there a fix?  Yes, and at the very least it's a good start. 

  1. There was legislation that required agencies to report on their anti-fraud measures the Congress allowed to lapse in 2020, under .... guess who.... Joe Biden's administration. Congress needs to reimplement that legislation to "drive accountability".
  2. Eliminate two thirds of the federal government. 
  3. Here’s another option that nobody mentions yet would do much, much more to permanently combat fraud. Stop sending taxpayer money to the states altogether:  

"States have little incentive to combat fraud in these programs. Why should they? It’s not their money they’re trying to protect. If anything, this kind of fraud is good for state politicians. As we saw in Minnesota, it brings lots of money in, and every year they can push for more federal funds by claiming the need is greater than ever."

Will any of this happen? No. Democrats love it and the Republicans are invertebrates.  Remember, no matter how much they wail in sackcloth and ashes, they went on vacation while the nation spirals down a maelstrom of debt.  

Update:  
  1. All Democrat State AGs Were Invited To VP Vance’s Anti-Fraud And Corruption Discussion, None Showed. Why? - All Democrats Boycott JD Vance's Anti-Fraud Roundtable, Because They're the Party of Looters and Shooters; Nick Shirley's Right-Hand Man Says That Autism Billing Went Up 47,000% (Which Means 470x) In Past Few Years. 
Update:  
  1.  Two federal agencies routed taxpayer dollars to terror-linked charities, new reports find6h ago - Two federal agencies gave away roughly $2 billion in taxpayer-funded health and humanitarian contracts to charities that watchdogs and a Senate committee have flagged for terror ties, meaning the government's own vetting either missed those records or decided their terrorist-linked status didn't disqualify the groups. .....

The Middle East Forum (MEF) recently reported that 14 terror-linked and extremist organizations, led by CAIR, collected nearly $80 million from HHS through the Refugee Resettlement, Health, and Mosque Renovation grants. Through this fund, the Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) California chapter received the most of any Islamist group, collecting $42.2 million in funding from the HHS to provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees. 

Update:   

  1. Trump’s Fraud Division takes the gloves off in fight against foreign nationals, others - The Department of Justice's fight against fraud is going to the next level. The Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division has now released its first comprehensive enforcement strategy. Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald circulated the memo on Thursday to all Fraud Division personnel, highlighting five focus areas: public trust, health care fraud, internal revenue scams, global trade subversion, and corporate misconduct........
Update:
  1.  Why Democrats Might Be So Friendly to Medicaid Fraud – 2026  “Don’t look, don’t think” looks to be the attitude politicians from state Sen. John Liu to Gov. Kathy Hochul to then-Health Secretary Xavier Becerra took to what seems blatant Medicaid fraud in Flushing. Donations and other political support may help explain the New York pols’ obliviousness, though like Becerra these Democrats seem to think stopping fraud is a waste of taxpayer money. The Post’s Chadwick Moore uncovered a trail of campaign contributions to Hochul and other pols from owners of some Flushing’s biggest Social Adult Day-Care businesses — centers that were empty of clients when our reporters visited (though none yet stands accused of wrongdoing). In 2022, Hochul’s campaign took in $55,000 from adult day-care operators who billed Medicaid more than $40 million since 2018.......
  2. For Today’s Democrats, Fraud Is A Feature, Not A Bug –One of the unanswered questions raised by Minnesota’s massive welfare scandal is how it could have gone on so long, given its scale and the fact that alarm bells had been clanging for years. The New York Times provided the answer, if inadvertently, when it quoted a former fraud investigator in the state attorney general’s office, who said that “There is a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting bloc” for Democrats. That is it in a nutshell when it comes to government waste, fraud, and abuse......

Thursday, October 30, 2025

The October I Owned the October Surprise

Jack Cashill Oct 29, 2025 @ Jack's Substack 

As this October winds to a close I find myself reflecting back to October 2008, the month I might have changed the course of American history but—spoiler alert—did not. In September of that year, I stumbled onto the likelihood that candidate Barack Obama commissioned terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers to put in superior prose the memoir Obama proved incapable of writing himself, the 1995 Dreams from My Father.

For Obama the revelation that Ayers was his muse would have been doubly problematic. For one, it would have dispelled the notion, widely believed among the literati, that Obama was about to become “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.” For another, more importantly, it would prove Obama lied boldly during a primary debate when he dismissed Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” In fact, the communist Ayers lived inside Obama’s brain.

(Jack’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.)

My thesis, conceded New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David Remnick, “if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of his candidacy.”

After some preliminary articles in WND.com, I knew that to make my case before the 2008 election, I needed considerable space in a prominent conservative publication. Unfortunately, establishment conservatives had become cautious to the point of cowardly—especially on the issue of race.

After much back and forth, Human Events punted on my research. The National Review did too. The FOX producers downstairs showed interest, but the suits upstairs did not. The once bold American Spectator waffled and then waved the white flag.

The feckless response of the Weekly Standard, a publication for which I occasionally wrote, echoed the others: “An interesting piece, but I’m rather oversubscribed at the moment, the length is considerable, and cutting would not do it justice. (Also, we had a long, rather critical, piece on Obama’s ouevre not too long ago.) So permit me to decline with thanks for allowing me take a look.” The kind of editors who would use a word like “oeuvre” in the heat of an election proved themselves so perfectly disdainful of Donald Trump that they oeuvred themselves out of business.

As I was about to despair, Thomas Lifson, publisher of the upstart American Thinker, came to my rescue. In 3700 words, I was able to summarize most of what I had learned to date: Obama’s failed publishing history, his lack of any prior quality work, the stunning parallels in imagery and style with Ayers’s books, and the often identical arguments.

My claims enraged those of the Left who bothered to read them. Wrote Remnick in his 2010 Obama biography The Bridge, “Cashill’s assertions might well have remained a mere twinkling in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit had it not been for the fact that more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency.” No voice would be more powerful than that of Rush Limbaugh, a man who haunted the liberal imagination the way Kong did Skull Island’s.

On October 10, at noontime, I checked my voice messages only to discover my inbox was full. The first voice mail explained it all, “Are you listening? Rush is talking about you.” Limbaugh was playing audio excerpts from Dreams and commenting on them. The one that triggered my name was this, “A steady attack on the White race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal responsibility . . . . “

“Stop the tape,” said Rush “What is this? Ballast? He doesn’t talk this way.” Ayers, a one time merchant seaman, did talk that way. “You know,” Rush continued, “there are stories out there, he may not have written this book. There’s a guy named Jack Cashill . . . . “

Observed Remnick, whose chief hobby seems to be imputing racism to people who live west of 10th Avenue, called Rush’s remarks one of the “most racist insinuations of the campaign.” He concluded that our collective “libel about Obama’s memoir—the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship—had a particularly ugly pedigree.”

Through some combination of naiveté and courage, author and attorney Andy McCarthy came to my defense in National Review Online. McCarthy called my analysis of Obama’s Dreams “thorough, thoughtful and alarming – particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama’s memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers’ memoir.”

The Left quickly pounced on McCarthy and the National Review, not with counter arguments but with ad hominems. The Atlantic turned to emerging black superstar Ta-Nehisi Coates to put McCarthy in his place. He extracted one of McCarthy’s quotes in my defense and introduced it with the barb, “How desperate can it get? This desperate.” The Atlantic added another quick review that began thusly, “At The Corner, Andy McCarthy evaluates Cashill’s argument and proves himself to be an idiot.”

Before the emergence of Donald Trump, Republicans reflexively folded their hands when the Left played the race card. As the weeks wound down to the election, I found myself mouthing the lyrics to that old Randy Travis song, “Is it still over? Are we still through? Since my phone still ain’t ringing, I assume it still ain’t you.” Despite my efforts to prime the pump, I did not receive a single call from anyone in the print or television media—right, left, or center.

In the years to come, all new evidence strengthened my case. In April 2011, when testing the presidential waters, Trump told Sean Hannity, “I heard [Obama] had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book [Dreams] that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book [Audacity of Hope] was written by an average person.”

“You suspect Bill Ayers?” said Hannity.

“I said, ‘Bill Ayers wrote [Dreams],’” Trump replied.

The media ignored Trump’s claim and zeroed in on his birth certificate challenge. The authorship challenge, they knew, could blow up in their faces.

Share it with your network to spread the word.  Jack’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Did you enjoy this post?


Friday, August 29, 2025

A Billion Dollar Somali Autism Fraud in Minnesota

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The $250 million ‘Feeding Our Future’ free food fraud in which Somali groups stole a quarter of a billion dollars while claiming to feed hundreds of thousands of children who never existed seemed like the biggest case of welfare fraud in Minnesota, but it may be just the beginning.

Somali autism fraud, partly linked to the ‘Feeding Our Future’ scam, may be even bigger and after the FBI raids of autism clinics last December, the scale of it is still being put together.

The pattern in both Somali meals for children and autism treatment for children is similar.

In 2019, Feeding Our Future distributed $3.4 million in taxpayer food aid funds to the non-profits it was sponsoring, In 2020, that shot up to $42 million and then up to $197 million in 2021.

EIDBI autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota similarly shot up from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million in 2021, $279 million in 2022, $399 million in 2023, and nearing $400 million most of the way through 2024 for a total of over $1.4 billion.

How did autism claims rise from $3 million to $400 million a year in just 4 years?

The number of autism providers shot up 700% from 41 to 328 over 5 years. 1 in 16 Somali four-year-olds (6%) were supposedly suffering from autism leading to a mass demand for services. Somalis had accused the Minnesota Department of Human Services of racism, and protested outside its offices to pressure it into providing funding for the $250 million ‘Feeding Our Future’ and similarly launched a pressure campaign to sign off on the autism fraud.

Somali community groups set up their own autism treatment centers to provide diverse “culturally appropriate programming” and Somali kids were seven times more likely to receive autism treatment than other children. Whistleblowers at the Minnesota Department of Human Services report that 1 in 5 autism centers in the state are now under investigation.

In the 85 investigations, of the 5 closed cases last year, all of them involved Somalis including apparently Sharmarke Issa, the former chair of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority who pleaded guilty over his involvement in the Feeding Our Future fraud.

Some of the autism clinics double dipped by also signing up to hand out meals to children. Smart Therapy, one of the autism clinics raided by the FBI, received $13 million from Medicaid and also signed up with Feeding Our Future to get ‘reimbursements’ from the government for allegedly feeding 300 kids a day for seven days a week which by 2021 was up to 500 kids.

The emails listed in the federal complaint appeared to be signed by Aisha Hassan, the CEO and President of Smart Therapy. The autism center was allegedly working with S&S Catering, whose owner Qamar Ahmed Hassan, took in $13 million in government money and then wrote checks to a travel agency specializing in Islamic tours of Mecca as part of the Feeding Our Future fraud. It’s unknown if Qamar Hassan and Asha Hassan are related, but a whistleblower told investigators that another Smart Therapy owner was indeed related to Qamar Hassan.

A Smart Therapy whistleblower stated that the employees were teenage family members of the owners with no training, spent all day on their phones, that the children were not autistic, and that their parents were paid to sign them up for ‘treatment’ with envelopes full of cash.

Star Autism Center, also raided by the FBI, billed Medicaid for 21.5 hours of autism therapy from one therapist in one day. Another billed 23 hours of services in a single day. Star’s organizer, Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf, claimed to know nothing. Both centers billed for treatments being provided by its ‘therapists’ while they were in Kenya (which hosts a large Somali migrant population) and Turkey which serves as a center for Islamic terrorist migration. Including ISIS.

It is difficult to know the full scale of the Somali autism fraud, but troublingly DHS Assistant Commissioner Natasha Merz had claimed that the catastrophic growth of the state’s autism program has been “pretty consistent” with other DHS programs including housing and disability funding. That means that the fraud we know could be only the tip of a massive iceberg.

For example, Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) was budgeted at $2.6 million when it was launched in 2020 but by 2024, was expected to hit $120 million. The sheer scale of welfare fraud under the Walz administration is so severe that hundreds of millions of dollars can easily vanish across the board without anyone even noticing because it’s no longer an aberration.

Under Gov. Tim Walz, it’s become routine for welfare programs to shoot up from the millions to the hundreds of millions. “Well, I think you’re always accountable for when things happen, but I think the accountability piece that we’re going to have to try and understand,” Walz replied, when asked about Minnesota’s spiraling welfare fraud crisis. “The question is, in state government, our job is to carry out the programs to try and get the resources to the people who need them.”

While Gov. Walz may act baffled, he and his political allies in the DFL chose to roll money out the door to Somali groups, while eliminating accountability and avoiding any scrutiny out of fear of racism. Between Attorney General Keith X. Ellison and DHS Inspector General Kulani Moti, a former public defender and the daughter of the first ‘Oromo’ immigrant from East Africa to move to Minnesota, sensitivity has been a priority, rigorous enforcement has not.

Somalis were already caught stealing tens of millions of dollars in various unrelated Medicaid health care frauds including $20 million in fraud in 2023 alone. This year there’s already been a Somali $7 million fraud conviction. But without federal investigations, these are just a fraction of the abuses being caught at the state level, even as the massive systematic fraud goes on.

Somali fraud now appears to equal half the budgets for the Twin Cities. How big can the fraud get before Minnesota runs out of money?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Sex Abuse Settlements Bankrupt Democrat States

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Los Angeles County is struggling with a massive budget crunch.

Sales taxes are rising to over 10% in some areas and many departments are being cut down the line over what Fesia Davenport, the county’s first black female CEO, has described as “unprecedented financial challenges” and “extraordinary budgetary pressures.”

But those challenges are not coming so much from the massive wildfires that devastated Los Angeles over the winter, but from the even more massive tide of sexual abuse complaints.

Los Angeles County is dealing with $2 billion in costs from the wildfires, after the city’s first black female mayor and first lesbian fire chief badly mishandled the blazes, but the $4 billion in sex abuse settlements are double the worst fires in the area’s history.

What does it say that sex abuse lawsuits have done twice as much damage to LA as the fires?

That $4 billion settlement over alleged abuses in county juvenile halls and foster homes, the largest in the county’s history, makes up nearly 9% of the county’s $47.9 billion budget.

And the bad news has just begun to arrive from the nearly 7,000 sex abuse claims filed so far.

“This is not a one-year, not even a one-decade impact. We anticipate that we will be paying hundreds of millions of dollars every year until 2030, and then millions more each year through fiscal year 2050,” Los Angeles County CEO Davenport warned.

Paying off the sex abuse claims from as far back as 40 years ago will require LA to issue bonds, divert money from reserve funds and make deep cuts in its budgets for the next 25 years.

And that’s not even the end of it.

The $4 billion is a group settlement which does not include all possible plaintiffs. Side negotiations are still taking place with more lawyers who want even more money. County lawyers had previously warned that “If all those cases were to proceed to verdict, the estimated liability could be in the tens of billions of dollars and bankrupt the county.”

Since Assembly Bill 218, which lifted the time limit on sex abuse lawsuits, is a state bill, Los Angeles could be the first of multiple California counties hit with multi-billion dollar bills.

An LA Times article called it as “a looming threat” that “could bankrupt California counties” and reported on a claim by Ventura County lawyers that it “threatens the ‘financial viability’ of every county and public school district in California” and represents a “statewide crisis”.

If a major red state were facing bankruptcy over decades of sex abuses, it would be a huge national story that the media would cover as indicative of the rot in its culture, but since the events are taking place in the bluest part of California, they remain a local story.

And yet Los Angeles County is not the only liberal area in the country being bankrupted by sex abuse settlements. The entire state of Maryland which is in a sex abuse crisis mode.

Like Los Angeles, Maryland unleashed a tidal wave of sex abuse claims by passing a law lifting time limits for sex abuse lawsuits against the state. And then quickly regretted it.

Maryland’s Child Victims Act was only passed in 2023, but legislators rushed to shut it down after it was estimated that the state was facing $4 billion in liabilities.

The same Democrat legislators, under Gov. Wes Moore, who had bragged about their passage of the Child Victims Act, corruptly rushed through a ‘fix’ through the state House, Senate and to Gov. Moore’s desk in a record two days to cover themselves. The ‘fix’ caps settlements for government institutions at $400,000 (and $700,000 for private ones) because, as Del. David Moon (D) explained, the state of Maryland “does not have the option of bankruptcy”.

Sen. Will Smith (D) explained that the ‘fix’ to the bill he had voted for was urgently needed because what “we could never have anticipated was just the sheer volume of cases that ensued”.

A state facing sex abuse bankruptcy and hypocritically rushing through a cap at the last minute should have been bigger news, but once again the national media tried to keep it quiet.

Why did California, Maryland and other state legislatures open the door to these lawsuits?

Democratic legislators were lobbied by politically connected law firms, often using alleged ‘victims’ as a front, with the promise of scoring big payouts from the Catholic Church. California and Maryland officials had been warned that they were exposing their states to untold billions in liability over accusations from a generation ago that could not be defended against.

The dirty little secret of the accusations is how few of them can even be verified.

With over 7,000 claims and over $4 billion in payouts so far, it would seem reasonable that hundreds of sex abusers had also been named and are being arrested and prosecuted.

The actual number in Los Angeles is 2. Not 2,000 or 200. Only 2.

As of 2023, the LA County DA’s office was reviewing the cases of two men, one of whom had allegedly groped a 17-year-old back in 2006, among 21 employees who had been placed on leave. As of now, there has yet to be any word of action actually being taken against them.

Either 2 men, or at best 21, molested thousands of teens, or there has been a massive failure of accountability. But more likely the actions of the California legislature unleashed a massive fraud. Local TV channels were filled with ads for lawyers promising big payouts and the lawsuits could be filed based on little to no evidence based on events that had happened in the 1980s.

One law firm, bragging that it was part of the “$500 million club” of the “National Academy of Sexual Abuse Lawyers” (no such organization appears to exist) even solicited clients by offering “cash advances” on their cases. Plaintiffs could get money just for making an allegation.

Lawsuits could be filed even if there had been no complaint, arrest or prosecution at the time of the alleged abuse. Little more was needed than the word of an individual and perhaps ‘corroboration’ from one of their friends. While there were real abuses and real victims, the wave of thousands of complaints made them all but impossible to seriously investigate.

AB 218 was proposed by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez-Fletcher, whose husband, a former fellow assemblyman, had to step down after being sued for sexual assault. Law firms and lawyers represent a not insignificant part of her donor base. And that of many politicians.

While the law firms expect to reap a fortune from these lawsuits, it’s unclear how much the victims, real or fictional, will even end up with, but most of it will go to the ambulance chasers.

Contingency fee rates fall between 33% to 60% of most such settlements. With the species of aggressive law firms spending millions on marketing alone, it’s a safe bet that the fee rate will be on the higher side and that at least $2 billion of the $4 billion settlement will go to the lawyers.

But the more likely scenario is that the law firms will take a majority of the cash.

Any actual victims will have to split the money with an army of fraudsters drawn by the ads and will receive a tiny percentage of the settlement after the lawyers and scam artists cash in. After the lawyers take 60% and the 70% of scammers take the rest, the victims may be left with 12%.

The law firms can be expected to pass the money back to the California legislators who enabled their money grab. While counties raise taxes and local schools cut services, the politicians responsible for this planned disaster will see contributions to their campaigns and ‘dark money’ donations to their 501(c)(3) social welfare nonprofits from those same law firms.

The politicians, some of who have turned a blind eye to sexual harassment in their own offices and among their own allies, will tell taxpayers that they need to pay more in the name of justice.

And life in California will get worse while those destroying the state will get even richer.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

 

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Fact Checking The Climate Claims

I & I Editorial Board July 22, 2025 @ Insight and Issues

Editor's Note:  I've not asked for nor have I received permission to post this article in full.  If the I&I Editorial Board objects I will re-post it as a link, but these are the kinds of articles that need the broadest distribution possible.   RK

The climate alarmists regularly seize on weather events they believe will help them exploit their narrative. Naturally, they ignore contradictory information. So 

we see it as our duty to fill in the gaps from time to time. Following are a few examples that show why the global warming story is less scientific theory than conjecture in the service of a political agenda.

  • Let’s begin in the West Arctic, where the Northwest Passage is experiencing its third-highest level of sea ice extent in the last two decades. In 2009, Al Gore said, with his usual galling listen-to-me certainty, the Arctic polar ice cap could be gone during summer within five to seven years.
  • There has been “marked cooling since the early 2010s … which is likely linked to a documented slowdown in Greenland’s warming and ice loss,” say a pair of South Korean researchers.
  • Efforts to attribute the deadly Texas flood, in which the Guadalupe River rose by 37.5 feet, to human carbon dioxide emissions have been debunked (as has every other attempt to tie man’s CO2 to harsh weather). Our friend Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com points out that “much worse flooding had occurred more than a century earlier in July when the Guadalupe River had risen by a whopping 42.3 feet.”
  • Summer heat is always blamed on man’s fossil fuel use. This year, more than 160 million people in the Midwest, the South, and on the East Coast endured temperatures around the 100-degree mark. But nothing has happened to indicate that man is responsible. Have a look at the data.
  • Last month, H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute noted that polar ice has refused to follow the climate crisis narrative. “Having examined the data and history, I knew Antarctica has not been following the climate crisis script since the alarm was first raised with James Hansen’s theatrically staged 1988 congressional testimony in which he claimed the Earth was dangerously warming due to human activity.”
  • Last month, a Tampa, Fla., meteorologist blamed “climate change,” and we don’t assume he’s talking about natural variations that have always existed, for 90-degree days having doubled in the city. He was fact-checked by the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow: “Tampa does not represent the rest of Florida. The average number of days reaching 95°F (35°C) or higher in Florida has not increased since 1895,” according to federal data. “Tampa’s temperature data has been contaminated with urban heat island effects, which have led to an artificial rise in the number of extremely hot days.”
  • The New York Times wants readers to believe that the June Air India crash that killed 241 is a curtain-raiser for future air crashes caused by climate change. Milloy had the best response: “No other plane crashed because of global warming. Just that one.”

If the climate tale were undeniably true, the activists in and out of the media would not have to exaggerate, disinform, and make connections that don’t exist. The fact that they feel they have to provides a clear insight into their duplicitous nature.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

Monday, May 19, 2025

Medicaid: End It, Don’t Mend It

I & I Editorial Board May 19, 2025

As soon as Republicans mentioned cutting spending on Medicaid as part of their “reconciliation” bill, the usual suspects started rolling out their standard talking points. They’re cutting health care for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich! Millions will lose coverage! The disabled will suffer! Oh, the humanity!

Well, if the GOP is going to be accused of destroying Medicaid when all they are proposing is a minor haircut, why not go all out and scrap this hopelessly flawed, fraud-riddled, budget-busting disaster of a program and start over from scratch?............To Read More....

My Take: This is a problem throughout the system, as ‘Significant’ Welfare Fraud Uncovered During Covid-19 Aid Investigation - In a new investigation, a federal committee tasked with tracking COVID-19 assistance fraud found tens of thousands of dishonest or erroneous Paycheck Protection Program applications.........

Monday, April 28, 2025

Updates On The Collapse Of The Climate Scam

@ Manhattan Contrarian

On April 14 I recorded a podcast with Tom Nelson. He has since posted a slightly edited version on his YouTube site. Go to this link if you would like to watch it — about an hour long. The main subject is the sordid history of EPA’s Endangerment Finding and efforts of people including myself to get it rescinded.

The good news on the Endangerment Finding front is that EPA under new Administrator Lee Zeldin is very much on the job of eliminating the EF. Of course, once it has been rescinded it will face a blizzard of legal challenges. I hope and expect that Zeldin and his team are up to the job of carrying out a rescission that will stick. I offered my suggestions for how to do a rescission that will stand up to challenge in this post from January 26.

Separately, Nelson has made a thing out of compiling a growing list of “Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing.” That list is now up to some 33 items and counting. The current version can be found here. Readers of this blog are likely already familiar with many of the items on Tom’s list. However, today I would like to feature a couple of items from Tom’s list that are important but may be less well known.

Item 3 on Tom’s list is that the funding of something called “NASA GISS” is likely to be terminated as part of the DOGE cost-cutting efforts. GISS is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For some unknown reason, GISS is part of NASA, and is located, of all place, in Manhattan, in an office building on upper Broadway near Columbia University. GISS is mainly known for producing a world temperature time series known as GISTEMP, which is systematically massaged and altered in ways to enhance the narrative of climate alarm. For more details than you will ever want to know about the data tampering, go to my 30+ part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.”

Tom calls NASA GISS a “climate alarm shop,” which is accurate. For many years it was headed by crazed alarmist James Hansen, until his retirement in 2013. Since then the head has been Gavin Schmidt, who has proved to be Hansen’s equal in spreading alarm. GISS is best known for its regular press releases proclaiming the most recent month or year to be the “warmest ever.” Indeed, GISS’s most recent press release, from January 10, has the headline “2024 Was the Warmest Year on Record.” Since January 20 GISS has not issued any further press releases, which hopefully represents some message control getting exerted by the Trump administration.

Following Nelson’s links, it is not clear to me that the information about the impending defunding of GISS is completely definitive. One link goes to this Wall Street Journal piece from March 29, with the following quote:

It is at NASA, though, where Musk is making the biggest shift in an agency’s priorities to align them with his own—both financially and personally.  He is working to recast its programs, reallocate federal spending and install loyalists to aid his decadeslong goal of sending people to Mars.

If true, that would certainly be bad news for GISS; but the WSJ does not mention GISS specifically,. Then there is this piece by Larry Bell at Newsmax today, which uses the WSJ piece to reach the conclusion that GISS is necessarily on the chopping block. From Newsmax:

[As] to NASA GISS, it’s difficult to imagine that any of the three dedicated space exploration action figures [Trump, Musk and new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacson] will wish to continue to divert any more of the agency’s annual $25 billion budget to support climate alarmism by an ugly poster child for DOGE waste spending reform.

So on this item Nelson may be getting a little ahead of himself, but there is certainly a good basis to hope.

Item 9 on Nelson’s list is the final demise of one of the longest-running climate litigations, the one known as Juliana v. United States. This is the case that I have sometimes referred to as the “stupidest litigation in the country.” I have had many posts on it over the years, most recently on April 9, 2024.

The Juliana case was brought way back in 2012 in the federal District of Oregon. The plaintiffs asserted a “constitutional right” to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as a remedy that the court impose a plan to “phase out” all use of fossil fuels. My April 9, 2024 piece included a fairly lengthy summary of the proceedings to that time, which had included three visits to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

After the Ninth Circuit had found a lack of standing for the plaintiffs in a 2020 decision, it had remanded the case back to the District Court with instructions to dismiss; but the District Court instead had given the plaintiffs another chance to amend the complaint to get around the problems. And then the District Court was starting to get the case ready for trial. So after four more years of getting jerked around in the District Court, the government was back in the Ninth Circuit with a mandamus petition when I wrote that post a year ago.

The latest news is that the Ninth Circuit granted the mandamus petition, and now, finally, the Supreme Court has denied a petition for certiorari from the plaintiffs. From Reuters, March 24, 2025:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by 21 young people to revive a novel lawsuit claiming the U.S. government's energy policies violate their rights to be protected from climate change. The justices denied a request by the youth activists to hear their appeal of a decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directing a federal judge in Oregon to dismiss the case after holding they lacked legal standing to sue.

So this one case is definitively over. The bad news is that there are many other similar and/or copycat cases out there kicking around in the courts. It will be a long time before they are all killed off, but at least this one is a start.

Check out Tom’s list for plenty more examples of the continuing, if painfully slow, demise of the climate scam.

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Covid Lies and the Human Consequences

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Ex-Illegal Alien Senator Suspected of Bribery Leads California’s Insurance

By @ Sultan Knish Blog

The Los Angeles wildfires estimates have hit $40 billion and may continue to rise. These are four times the losses of the most recent destructive fires and that is likely to convince even more insurance companies to leave the state and make homeowners even more uninsurable.

The exodus of insurance companies led to a 123% increase in the number of California homeowners relying on the state’s FAIR Plan. The FAIR Plan, a government gimmick that seemed good at the time, has $458 billion in total exposure and $4.8 billion in exposure from the current fires, but only has $377 million to cover claims. Once that’s exhausted, the state is likely to hit up insurance companies and homeowners to make up the difference. With mudslides expected to arrive after the rains, the chain of disasters may just be getting underway.

While the state’s worst insurance crisis was going on, Sen. Susan Rubio, the former chair of the Senate Insurance Committee, was fighting for illegal aliens while under suspicion of bribery.

Illegal aliens like her.

“We do not let Trump harass, intimidate, and push our immigrant community,” Sen. Susan Rubio threatened at a ‘healing circle’ convened by the state legislative building to protest Trump.

Rubio, who varyingly claims to have been deported when she was 4 or 6 years old, has made that her claim to fame. That and also having her sister serve in the assembly. And being caught up in the wave of FBI corruption investigations hollowing out the California Democratic Party.

Over the last decade, 576 California officials were convicted on federal corruption charges.

Rubio’s Baldwin Park, in the San Gabriel Valley region, was an epicenter of local corruption with its former city manager, city attorney and city councilman pleading guilty in a drug bribery scheme. Drug ‘legalization’ unleashed a whole new crime wave of ‘illegal’ marijuana growing operations and bribes to politicians by ‘legal’ drug businesses seeking permits. Sen. Rubio, who came out of the corrupt Baldwin Park City Council, was questioned by the FBI in that massive drug bribery scheme which briefly prevented her from heading up the insurance committee.

According to CalMatters reporting, “nobody else” but Rubio fits the description of “Person 20, who is accused in recently released federal court documents of asking for $240,000 in bribes from a cannabis company and accepting $30,000 in illegal campaign contributions.”‘

This would be a major issue in California’s insurance business whose Democrat leaders are nearly as corrupt as the state’s growing drug business.

Former Sen. Ron Calderon, who had previously chaired the Senate Insurance Committee, had been ousted over his role in the “largest insurance fraud case” in the history of the California Department of Insurance and was sentenced to several years in prison.

Senate Democrats had tried to protect former Sen. Caledron by removing him ‘without prejudice’ from the chairmanship of the Senate Insurance Committee. They attempted to do something similar but also far worse for Sen. Rubio, holding the chairmanship of the committee open for her by maintaining a vacancy just in time for the catastrophic wildfires to hit California.

Senate President pro-Tempore Mike McGuire corruptly prioritized Sen. Rubio’s political standing over that of the welfare of California homeowners by keeping a crucial position vacant for her. And with a fire and insurance crisis engulfing the state, no one was heading up the Senate Insurance Committee while its head-in-waiting was busy campaigning for illegal aliens.

Mounting outrage over the move did not lead Senate Democrats to appoint a credible alternative. Instead, Senate President McGuire announced that he was reappointing Rubio because “no case has been filed by the U.S. Attorney’s office and no additional information is available from the U.S. Attorney’s office.” This does not mean that Sen. Rubio isn’t potentially Person 20 who may be indicted at any time over allegations of soliciting $250,000 in bribes.

Should that happen, the work of the Senate Insurance Committee will devolve into a mess.

According to McGuire, he kept the Senate Insurance Committee seat vacant for the formerly deported illegal alien because “the Senate takes allegations of ethical and criminal behavior incredibly seriously”. The Democrat leadership took it so seriously that it kept the seat vacant for over a week while its legal counsel conducted its own ‘investigation’ into the allegations.

The investigation apparently consisted of querying the U.S. Attorney’s office over whether Sen. Rubio was about to be charged. Now, according to McGuire, since she isn’t being charged as of the moment, he has “confidence in her experience, and her ability to lead the Committee while the State faces unprecedented challenges with the insurance market.”

According to Sen. Rubio’s spokesman, she’s “currently not involved” in the investigation. That same spokesman also claimed that she wasn’t even interested in the role anymore. Now a week later she’s ready to lead the Committee through “unprecedented challenges”.

Unless it turns out that she actually is being indicted.

Should she be indicted, Rubio, a former deported resident, who is one of two sisters in the California legislature, will make history once again because “no woman California legislator has ever been indicted on public corruption charges while in office. Several male Assembly members and senators have been charged with such crimes over the years.” Truly historic.

That would make two Senate chairs of the Insurance Committee to be indicted in a dozen years.

California homeowners are facing an unprecedented crisis. And the crisis is as much of a political disaster as it is a natural one. While some blame global warming for worsening this latest disaster, it is the corrupt politics of the state’s political majority that is the real issue.

California’s Democrat majority has sent the state down into a chain of crises, from crime to homelessness to droughts and disasters, worsening natural crises and manufacturing human crises, raising endless taxes and bonds with the promise of finally solving them only to corruptly loot the money for special interests, politically connected allies and into their own pockets.

Now, as California desperately needs to save its insurance market, the ex-illegal alien in a position to shape the state’s response may become its latest official indicted for corruption.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.Thank you for reading.


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