How Cancer Deaths From the Covid Jabs Are Being Hidden

by Dr. Joseph Mercola October 14, 2022 in Cross-Posted, Opinions  

Story at a glance:

• Analysis of U.S. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) data suggests the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been filtering and redesignating cancer deaths as COVID deaths since April 2021 to eliminate the cancer signal
• The signal is being hidden by swapping the underlying cause of death with main cause of death
• Uncontrollable turbo-charged cancers the medical establishment had never seen before only started to occur after the rollout of the COVID jabs
• Before it was manipulated to eliminate the safety signal, data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showed cancer rates among military personnel and their families tripled after the rollout of the shots
• After the rollout of the COVID jabs in 2021, cancer patients have gotten younger, with the largest increase occurring among 30- to 50-year-olds, tumor sizes are dramatically larger, multiple tumors in multiple organs are becoming more common, and recurrence and metastasis are increasing

In a series of Twitter posts, The Ethical Skeptic — self-described as a former intelligence officer and strategist — has laid out a series of charts illustrating how cancer deaths are being mislabeled as COVID deaths...........The sad reality is that most data sources have at this point been so corrupted, it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to get the whole truth. The CDC started manipulating the data in 2020 and hasn’t stopped. DMED, which has historically been one of the best and most pristine, has now been modified. Other data sources have suffered the same fate.............To Read More....

Brett Favre, Redistribution, Welfare Reform, and Government-Enabled Corruption

October 12, 2022 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I have repeatedly opined that big government enables corruption.

 

And I have also asserted over and over again that big government is a racket for the benefit of insiders.

So you can understand why I get upset when the rich and powerful use the coercive power of government to line their pockets at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.

Now I have a new reason to be angry.

Reporting for the New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar describes a scandal involving Mississippi bigwigs feeding at the public trough.

John Davis, who served as executive director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services under former Gov. Phil Bryant, pleaded guilty to both federal and state charges of embezzling federal welfare funds. Millions of dollars were transferred to friends and relatives, court documents say. According to a lawsuit filed by the state in May, around $5 million was diverted to Ted DiBiase, a flamboyant retired wrestler once known as “The Million Dollar Man,” and two of his sons…

Much of the money went to fictitious services, bogus jobs, first-class travel arrangements and even one son’s stay at a luxury rehab center in Malibu, Calif., that cost $160,000, the suit claims. Similarly, the state claims that Marcus Dupree, a former high school football phenom and professional running back, who was paid to act as a celebrity endorser and motivational speaker, did not perform any contractual services toward the $371,000 he received to purchase and live in a sprawling residence with a swimming pool and adjacent horse pastures in a gated community.

Mr. Favre, who earned more than $140 million in his Hall of Fame career, was paid $1.1 million for speeches he never gave, the suit said. He also orchestrated more than $2 million in government funds being channeled to a biotechnology start-up in which he had invested, according to the suit. …The case follows a state audit released in May 2020 suggesting that as much as $94 million of TANF funds might have gone astray.

Sounds like a typical story about big government and corruption, right?

That’s certainly true, but some of our friends on the left argue that it is also evidence that Bill Clinton’s welfare reform backfired.

Experts said the fraud was rooted in changes enacted in such programs in 1996, when cash benefits paid to poor families were replaced by block grants issued to states.

Since I have defended Clinton’s welfare reform (along with some of his other good policies), the above excerpt caught my attention.

So I looked for more information.

In a piece for the American Enterprise Institute, Angela Rachidi explains the underlying issues.

A scandal involving former NFL quarterback Brett Favre and the federal welfare program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) exploded…following new revelations that Mississippi officials, including the former governor, misdirected federal TANF money to enrich themselves, their celebrity friends, and other well-connected individuals. …the scandal draws attention to the TANF program. Critics have partly blamed the welfare reform law from 1996, which created TANF, for allowing such fraud. …

Instead of an entitlement where government officials distribute money to all eligible people, TANF is a block grant provided… As awful as this scandal is, the fraud and abuse on display in Mississippi is not unique to TANF and not caused by its block grant structure.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that from 2015–2017 the annual average amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (or food stamps) “trafficked,” meaning retailers taking a fraudulent profit, was $1.2 billion. The GAO also found that improper payments in Medicaid, including payments for services not provided, totaled $36.7 billion in 2017. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice charged a nonprofit organization in Minnesota with a $250 million scheme that took federal pandemic-relief money earmarked for a child nutrition program and instead pocketed the funds.

In other words, corruption is an inherent part of government programs, whether the money is distributed as block grants or sent directly to recipients.

But not all government spending is created equal. Some ways of spending money do more damage than other ways of spending money.

Ms. Rachidi points out that welfare reform produced good results.  I don’t know if it saved money for taxpayers, but it led to progress as measured by variables such as labor force participation and child poverty.

None of this excuses what happened in Mississippi, but the context is important. Welfare reform, which created TANF, transformed a broken entitlement program—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—into a more effective system that gives states flexibility to address the underlying causes of poverty, including limited employment and unmarried parenthood. These reforms have significantly reduced dependence on cash welfare and increased employment among single mothers, which helped dramatically lower child poverty over the past two decades.

The obvious takeaway, as I pointed out back in 2015, is that we should we should be expanding on Bill Clinton’s success by replacing other federal entitlements with block grants.

The federal government maintains a Byzantine maze of redistribution programs, so there are lots of opportunities for progress. Medicaid is an obvious example, along with food stamps. Especially since both programs are riddled with fraud.

P.S. Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden wants to move in the wrong direction.

P.P.S. In my libertarian fantasy world, the federal government would have neither entitlements nor block grants. That also happens to the world envisioned by America’s Founders (and the reality Americans enjoyed up until the 1930s).

 

Politician of the Year

October 10, 2022 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Because of their despicable tendency to buy votes with our money, I view politicians with considerable disdain. But when a politician goes above and beyond the call of duty by doing something laughably awful, I give them special recognition.

Here are some past winners of my “Politician of the Year” award.

• Gavin Newsom, Eric Garcetti, and Stacey Abrams
• Elizabeth Warren
• Richard Blumenthal
• Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Jim Kenney
• D.C. Councilman Jack Evans
• Malaysia’s Prime Minister
• France’s President
• President of the Philippines

Today’s column adds someone to this rogue’s gallery. Congratulations to the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.

In a story for the New York Post, Susan Edelman reveals a cozy and corrupt arrangement between the Mayor and one of his top appointees.

Schools Chancellor David Banks quietly promoted Mayor Adams’ girlfriend to a top job at the Department of Education, just months after Adams hired Banks’ girlfriend as a deputy mayor, The Post has learned. Banks named Tracey Collins — Adams’ longtime partner and NYC’s unofficial First Lady — the DOE’s “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” Desmond Blackburn. She started the new job in July, and got a giant, 23% raise to $221,597 a year, records show. Hizzoner named Banks’ girlfriend, Sheena Wright, and four other women deputy mayors last Dec. 21. Deputy mayors made $251,982 in FY 21. …David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center education professor, said, “It’s not only a bad look, smacking of favoritism and cronyism. It displays a degree of insularity and groupthink that’s adverse to organizational effectiveness.”

Needless to say, everyone involved claims that the appointments were based on merit.

DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer said Collins, “a veteran educator with 30 years of experience,” replaced another senior advisor, Mariano Guzman, who retired. Styer said Collins “went through a rigorous process that did not include City Hall’s oversight. …City Hall spokesman Fabien Levy said, “Mayor Adams was not involved in the hiring for this position and has a strict firewall when it comes to any matters involving her employment.”

Needless to say, these claims don’t pass the laugh test. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature understands that Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks are helping to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers.

But I want to make a different point.

If you paid close attention to the above excerpts, you noticed that the girlfriend of Mayor Adams is making more than $221K to serve as “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership.”

 

I realize this is just a stab in the dark, but that job should not even exist, just like the job of “deputy chancellor of school leadership” should not exist (and the same is true if there’s a “chancellor of school leadership”).

In other words, all of these slots are sad examples of the self-serving bureaucuratization of government schools.

And let’s not forget about the girlfriend of Chancellor Banks, who is getting nearly $252K to be one of a plethora of deputy mayors.

Once again, I’m going to take a wild guess and assert that none of the deputy mayors serve any necessary function. These slots almost surely are patronage appointments that allow insiders to get fatter and richer at the expense of taxpayers.

That’s the real scandal, financed by you and me.

New Covid Plandemic Documentary Exposes the Truth About Ivermectin and the Scandal That Let Millions of People Die Needlessly

September 24, 2022 by Brian Shilhavy Editor, Health Impact News

Film producer Mikki Willis self-funded and self-published the most censored and most-viewed documentary in 2020 exposing the fraud concerning the COVID-19 “pandemic” that he and others have correctly relabeled as the “Plandemic.”

If you have never watched it, you are truly missing very important information about the pre-planned event that changed our world forever. See:

PLANDEMIC: Full Feature Film Released Online Amidst Tremendous Opposition and Attempts to Censor it

Willis is now producing Plandemic III, and he recently released a 13-minute documentary on Ivermectin, the FDA-approved drug with a 30+ year record of safety and efficacy, which many physicians began to use to treat symptomatic COVID patients with, and a near 100% recovery success rate.................To Read More....

'We Lied the Last 1,000 Times, Trust Us Now'

Daniel Greenfield  August 25, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

Remember the time the media justified the feds investigating, entrapping, eavesdropping and arresting Trump associates based on a bunch of nonsense assembled by a former British secret agent working for the Clinton campaign? Don’t worry, this time it’ll be different.

Or how about when a senile former FBI boss was dragged out of retirement to serve as the public face of a team of Democrat prosecutors who ran an “independent” investigation of Trump for two years that turned up absolutely nothing? Probably not this time.

This time there are nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago which actually turned out to be a pardon agreement, expired passports and Melania’s unmentionables. Who could have seen that coming after this long history of entirely trustworthy political hit jobs disguised as investigations?

Democrats, their media and their media’s contracted experts tell us we should trust the DOJ, the FBI and the same folks who have been pulling some variation of this scam for the last six years to know what they’re doing when they set out with a search warrant empowering them to grab every single box at Mar-a-Lago, every administration record and anything else they want.

In America, the public is supposed to distrust the government and the government is supposed to trust the people. In D.C., the government doesn’t trust the public, but tells the public to trust the government. And who wouldn’t trust an investigation based on a secret affidavit that can’t be released because then the public might find out it’s as legit as Steele and Mueller?

If you can’t trust hacks pulling a political hit job before an election, whom can you trust?

Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who was fired for attacking Trump even while he was supposed to be investigating him, told MSNBC that, "the American public should trust what the FBI is doing." If you can’t trust a disgraced former FBI agent obsessed with destroying Trump to assure you that his compadres are running an honest investigation, whom can you trust?

Last year, Strzok also insisted that, "there was never an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign". A year of investigations, informants, FISA warrants never happened. Much like Strzok’s affair with a colleague, his political biases, and his post-disgrace career as a professor at Georgetown University teaching counterintelligence theory also never happened.

Not only did we lie to you a thousand times over, but we’re still lying to you right now.

Trust us.

The media, which is trusted by 11% of Americans, tells them that they ought to have faith that Joe Biden, whom even 75% of Democrats don’t want to see in office anymore, and his political appointee, AG Merrick Garland, who got the job as a consolation prize for not getting a SCOTUS seat, probably know what they’re doing by going after a potential 2024 opponent.

They do. What they’re doing has nothing to do with the words coming out of their lying mouths.

But we have to focus on what really matters.

Rep. Adam Schiff wants to replace Pelosi. A whole bunch of retired Obama appointees who ran the CIA, FBI, NSA and some other three-letter words into the ground need CNN contracts. The media has lost millions of readers and billions of dollars. It’s shedding jobs faster than Chinese mask makers and CNN’s entire viewing audience can fit in the back room of a 7-11.

Only Trump can save them now. Or at least another Trump investigation.

We’ve all been through this. The Trump investigations are the Marvel movie franchise of politics. They’ve been around forever and after all that time and energy, they never go anywhere. The purpose of the investigation is the investigation. The changing charges are a pretext for perpetuating a political witch hunt. The promises of a takedown flicker out like the old Mueller votive candles. And yet the true believers are still convinced that this time it’ll be different.

Trust us. That message isn’t there for Republicans who haven’t trusted the media since 1972. It’s not there for the independents who never trusted the media. It’s there for the Democrats who still believe what CNN tells them. And they’re holding on for the endgame that never comes.

Children born when the Democrats first began investigating Trump on various charges that have all since fallen apart are now first graders. An entire generation was born and is now being groomed by woke preschool teachers to think that they’re the opposite of whatever sex they were born while the Steele dossier and the Mueller investigation added up to nothing.

They will at this rate grow up, go to worthless colleges that will saddle them with seven-figure debts, get jobs installing solar panels or teaching equity to squirrels, and grow old while the Democrats conduct another investigation and another FBI raid on Trump’s tomb.

There’s never going to be a trial because those require evidence. Court cases have much higher standards than impeachment proceedings where Jamie Raskin can pound the pulpit, wave his arms and know that it doesn’t matter because the vote will split down party lines.

Unlike his associates who lack the resources to spend years fighting a federal investigation, and plead out to end the torture, Trump has the money and the lawyers to play the game. And that’s why there can’t be an actual trial. There will only be the perpetual investigation. Interlocking teams of Democrats at the federal and state levels will generate and juggle investigations.

The only thing any of those investigations will do is generate more investigations.

Like generals still refighting the Vietnam War, Democrats have tried to ‘Nixon’ every single Republican president and haven’t brought one single one down since 1974. The investigations of Reagan, two Bushes, and Trump wasted enough money to clone Biden some real hair. Impeachment resolutions have been introduced against every single Republican president since. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, who spent almost 40 years in Congress, launched impeachment proceedings against Reagan and Bush. If he were still around, he’d be thrilled.

The difference is that the investigations are now permanent. They begin before a candidate even runs, follow him through his time in office, and hound him after he leaves. Trump was the first target of the permanent investigation. He won’t be the last. The permanent investigation is government opposition research. It interlocks directly with political campaigns, whether those of Hillary or Biden, and feeds material back and forth between government investigators and campaign hacks. It takes out their allies and aides to weaken them.

This isn’t a criminal case. It can be a counterintelligence investigation, a fishing expedition for process crimes and procedural violations that never finds a justifiable original crime. The one thing it can’t produce is an original crime that justifies the original investigation. That’s also why the investigation has to be permanent. If it were to ever end, there would have to be a reckoning. An endless investigation however always holds out the promise that one day there will be something. The fraudulence of the endless Trumpgate is why it can never end.

“Trust us. This time it will be different. It can’t all have been a bunch of lies. Right?”

Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

The Clinton campaign's plot to politically assassinate Trump

By Peter Van Buren 

There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them. According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The Clinton campaign during the election hid from FBI, CIA and the media that it was the source of the information gathered. Durham doesn't use the word "spy", but that in no way changes what happened.

The recent filing relates to Durham's September indictment of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented the Clinton campaign while at the Perkins Coie law firm. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI at a September 2016 meeting when he presented documents claiming to show internet communications between Trump and Russia-based Alfa Bank. The indictment says Sussmann falsely told the FBI he was presenting this information as a good citizen, purposely hiding his ties to Clinton. The allegations about the bank were false.

The new filing is at its heart legal housekeeping, asking that a waiver be considered to allow Sussmann to retain his current law firm. A potential conflict of interest exists because Sussmann's representative works for a law firm which also represents others Durham may be going after, and may have been involved in the larger events under investigation, perhaps as witnesses. While that is interesting in itself, what is newsworthy are broader details of what really happened around Russiagate that potentially point to crimes on a Watergate scale...............But this is not a fake scandal. Durham has potentially uncovered the most destructive political assassination attempt since Kennedy......To Read More....

 

Zucker and Schadenfreude

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags:

There's been a load of schadenfreude over CNN Chief Jeff Zucker resigning, or being forced to resign, this week, and I have no doubt it's justified.  It's been a bad week for leftist media this week, and everyone seems to be joyfully telling the story about him being called to task because:

As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years. I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong. As a result I am resigning today.

Really?  C'mon man, do you really believe that's it?  

This is a network that seems awash in sex scandals.  Think about this:

Chris Cuomo was apparently a long time sexual harasser on the job and it took a long time to do anything about it. "Jeffrey Toobin was caught masturbating on a work Zoom call" and he's still on the air. "Two CNN producers are implicated in sex crimes involving children. The first, John Griffin, is charged with trolling underage girls for sex. The second was a producer for Jake Tapper’s basement-rated show."  "On top of all that, CNN anchor Don Lemon has been credibly accused of a sexual assault and remains on the air, despite a viewership that regularly dips below 500,000."

But Jeff Zucker destroyed CNN with his arrogance, extreme leftist delusions, lies, misinformation, anti-Trump conspiracy claims and his network's open embrace of leftist "political violence against the right and encouraged riots in predominantly black neighborhoods."

• The Russia Collusion Hoax, the Covington Kids, “Hands Up; Don’t Shoot,” among countless others.
  

There's more to this Jeff Zucker story that's not being covered in my opinion.  Think about this.

• First, this wasn't any secret tryst.  Everyone knew about it, it was an "open secret".
  
• Second, these were two consenting adults who decided to violate their vows of fidelity to their mates, destroying their marriages in order to have this affair. No one was being forced! I have to seriously wonder at her taste in men, but that's another story, and maybe not a pretty one.
  
• Third, his paramour is still working there.  If this was such a big deal, why hasn't she been fired or forced to resign?
  
• Fourth, there are new owners at CNN and want to change the network's direction, but just like Biden doubles down on his failed policies, I'm convinced he was fighting the new owners, and was going to ignore the new owners instructions and double down on his stupid policies.  It's my view Zucker is an absolutely arrogant jerk, with a big ego and a bad attitude, and he's an incompetent lefty, and they wanted him out and weren't going to put up with him.  

This wasn't about sex, it was about competence, and media corruption.   This was the new owners way out to getting rid of him, and since there is a morality clause in their contracts, they can fire him for cause and not pay him off.   So he resigned.  Now, I think that's the real story.......... with a caveat. 

 

Think about this.  He resigned, he wasn't fired! They must have given him the option and he chose to resign instead of being fired.  Why?  It's my understanding he had an unfulfilled contract, and if they had fired him it could end up on court, but he resigned instead.  Why?

 

Here's the questions that should be asked.  

• Did they secretly agree to pay him off?  If so, that's the end of the story.   
• If not, the story continues and one has to wonder: 
• Do they have a lot more on Zucker?
• If they do, what is it?   
• What could he have done that was so bad it would get him to acquiesce so easily and quickly, and go quietly into the night.

Just a thought.   

 

The Real USC Scandal is How Democrat Pols, Not Celebs, Got In

Daniel Greenfield November 28, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

The arrest of Los Angeles Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas over a bribery scheme was nothing special. Recent arrests and indictments have decimated the ranks of the Cincinnati and Detroit city councils. The corruption of urban Democrat machines is a dog bites man story and the responsibility of those machines for much of the misery they blame on the myth of “systemic racism” may well be the single most underreported story in the establishment media.

What makes the Ridley-Thomas arrest stand out is that the bribe was academic.

Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, Mark's son, had followed his father into Democrat politics, and was elected to the California State Assembly before being accused of sexual harassment. The second generation of the Democrat dynasty was falling apart and Sebastian stepped down while blaming health problems. 

The health problems didn’t prevent him from creating Millennial Advisors, and the Policy, Research and Practice Initiative to “research” black voters.

And he got a job at the University of Southern California.  USC named Sebastian a  "professor of practice of policy and social work" and also gave him a scholarship to study for a master’s in social work. Prosecutors allege that Marilyn Flynn, the dean of USC's School of Social Work, and a major donor to Mark Ridley-Thomas, told "multiple USC officials about Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, explaining who his father was and saying his admission should be given the highest priority."

An hour earlier, the dean had been told that a $9 million contract was ready to go.

Flynn urged USC figures to rush it through “in the interests of showing MRT that we can deliver.” The indictment emails show the USC dean greedily salivating that, “there are significant amounts of county funds available” and “should give us $1M each year for three years.”

Where was that money coming from? Contracts with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Department of Mental Health. Some of the most vulnerable members of society, the people whom the Democrats and the USC social workers claimed to be protecting were actually being used as counters in a corrupt scheme to enrich Democrats.

The whole thing came apart when the Mark Ridley-Thomas Committee for a Better L.A. funneled $100,000 through the USC School of Social Work to Sebastian's Policy, Research and Practice Initiative. Whistles were blown and both Mark and Marilyn Flynn were busted.

Despite the massive abuse of taxpayer money, the corruption of both government and academia by the largest social work program in the country and a Democrat dynasty, this USC scandal has received practically no coverage outside the local media. The difference between the national media’s gleeful coverage of allegations that B-list celebs had bent the rules to get their kids into USC and this much more serious case is strikingly revealing. And it’s not over.

While Mark Ridley-Thomas may be an obscure name to most people outside Los Angeles, that’s not the case with Rep. Karen Bass, a member of Congress, who had been touted as one of the top two Biden VP picks, and is considered a front-runner to become LA’s next mayor.

Bass, a Castro supporter with Communist ties (“‘I’m Not a Communist’: Potential Biden Running Mate Reassures” an NBC News headline had read last year) hasn’t been charged with anything, but her case is in some ways even more curious than that of Sebastian.

The lefty House Democrat had received an unsolicited $95,000 tuition award from the USC School of Social Work allowing her to “earn” an online master’s degree.

The Los Angeles Times noted that, “some of her coursework was supervised by a prominent campaign donor who was also a USC professor at the time”. Flynn, “offered the scholarship to Bass even though she had not directly applied to the social work program.”

Flynn approached Bass and offered her a "scholarship" that was not available to students. The USC School of Social Work dean claimed that Bass was chosen because she "demonstrated an exceptional potential for contribution to the field" and had “obvious leadership skills.”

What did Flynn actually expect from Bass’ “contribution to the field”? Good question. Just don’t expect the same national news media that was defending Bass over her support for Castro and other Communists to ask any such basic questions even while the Castroite runs for mayor.

The LA Times also noted that, “The full value of Bass’ scholarship was not listed on her congressional disclosure forms until 2019, when forms from several years were amended and a total of more than $80,000 in free tuition was added to her gift disclosures.”

Academia’s lefty bias is nothing new, but USC represents a more complicated financial entanglement with the Democrats. The university spends half a million a year on lobbying, it takes in millions in government contracts, and its faculty, administrators and other employees plowed over $2.6 million into political campaigns in 2020 alone. The vast majority of that money, 96.5% or nearly $1.8 million donated to federal election candidates, went to Democrats.

The USC School of Social Work had grown so big because of an online “deal with the devil” that the university had struck with 2U, a multi-billion dollar online education platform founded and run by Christopher “Chip” Paucek who had served as the deputy campaign manager for Democrat Senator Barbara Mikulski. (Another Mikulski alum is Democrat political consultant Bob Shrum, who heads the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, and was quoted by the LA Times.)

USC and 2U offered a $115,000 online social work master's degree, aggressively targeting minority and underperforming students with GPAs as low as 2.5 and leaving them with huge debts and low income careers. 2U allegedly got 60% of the revenue from the program which helped make it a huge player in the online education space while USC was left with the debt.

Mass education and the welfare state have proven to be quite profitable for Democrat elites while poisoning everything that they touch and leaving broken lives in their wake.

The real scandal at USC was the familiar one of Democrat elites exploiting black people in the name of empowering them and black leaders happily participating in the program. Some of the damage was passed along to taxpayers in the form of scholarships, and the varied players were able to move money around to each other until a few of the players became too brazen.

It’s a much bigger scandal than a Full House cast member trying to get her daughter into USC.

Marilyn Flynn, now the USC School of Social Work's former dean, has been indicted, and pled not guilty. Mark Ridley-Thomas also pled not guilty and was suspended from the Los Angeles City Council. In a bizarre arrangement, his chief of staff is serving as the district’s “caretaker”.

But it’s implausible that Flynn or Ridley-Thomas acted alone. In their alleged corrupt actions, they consulted and coordinated with multiple USC and local government officials. This isn’t the story of a few corrupt people, but a corrupt system which exploits those it claims to be helping.

How did Rep. Karen Bass, with her six-figure government salary, qualify for a $95,000 scholarship? Don’t ask USC whose spokesperson sneered that they had no idea, “what policies and procedures were in place at the School of Social Work 10 years ago.”

The cynicism is almost as breathtaking as the 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. 

Thank you for reading.

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

Democrats turn down top lobbying roles at Facebook as scandals pile up

by Nihal Krishan, Technology Reporter | October 27, 2021

Facebook is reportedly struggling to hire Democrats for its lobbying shop in Washington despite paying top dollar, a potential sign that the social media behemoth is now deemed radioactive by many on the Left.

President Joe Biden's administration and Democrats in Congress have threatened to go after Facebook with aggressive regulations, lawsuits, and investigations, and that appears to be making it an unattractive employer for top talent. Making matters worse, some senior Democratic lobbyists have left the company recently, the Wall Street Journal reported...............To Read More......

 My Take - I'm not sure I understand this at all.  Didn't Zuckerberg do all he could to get Biden elected?   I will have to see more of this play out in the future.

New Leak of Taxpayer Info Is (More) Evidence of IRS Corruption

June 9, 2021 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty 

I sometimes try to go easy on the IRS. After all, our wretched tax system is largely the fault of politicians, who have spent the past 108 years creating a punitive and corrupt set of tax laws.

But there is still plenty of IRS behavior to criticize. Most notably, the tax agency allowed itself to be weaponized by the Obama White House, using its power to persecute and harass organizations associated with the “Tea Party.”

That grotesque abuse of power largely was designed to weaken opposition to Obama’s statist agenda and make it easier for him to win re-election.

Now there’s a new IRS scandal. In hopes of advancing President Biden’s class-warfare agenda, the bureaucrats have leaked confidential taxpayer information to ProPublica, a left-wing website.

Here’s some of what that group posted.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. …ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period. We’re going to call this their true tax rate. …those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

Since I’m a policy wonk, I’ll first point out that ProPublica created a make-believe number. We (thankfully) don’t tax wealth in the United States.  So Elon Musk’s income is completely unrelated to what happened to the value of his Tesla shares. The same is true for Jeff Bezos’ income and the value of his Amazon stock.*

And the same thing is true for the rest of us. If our IRA or 401(k) rises in value, that doesn’t mean our taxable income has increased. If our home becomes more valuable, that also doesn’t count as taxable income.  The Wall Street Journal opined on this topic today and made a similar point.

There is no evidence of illegality in the ProPublica story. …ProPublica knows this, so its story tries to invent a scandal by calculating what it calls the “true tax rate” these fellows are paying. This is a phony construct that exists nowhere in the law and compares how much the “wealth” of these individuals increased from 2014 to 2018 compared to how much income tax they paid. …what Americans pay is a tax on income, not wealth.

Some journalists don’t understand this distinction between income and wealth.  Or perhaps they do understand, but pretend otherwise because they see their role as being handmaidens of the Biden Administration. Consider these excerpts from a column by Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times.

Jeff Bezos…added an estimated $99 billion in wealth between 2014 and 2018 but reported only $4.22 billion in taxable income during that period. Warren Buffett, who amassed $24.3 billion in new wealth over those years, reported $125 million in taxable income. …some of the wealthiest people in the United States essentially live under a different system of income taxation from the rest of us.

Mr. Appelbaum is wrong. The rich have a lot more assets than the rest of us, but they operate under the same rules.  If I have an asset that increases in value, that doesn’t count as taxable income. And it isn’t income. It’s merely a change in net wealth.  And the same is true if Bill Gates has an asset that increases in value.  Now that we’ve addressed the policy mistakes, let’s turn our attention to the scandal of IRS misbehavior.

The WSJ‘s editorial addresses the agency’s grotesque actions.

Less than half a year into the Biden Presidency, the Internal Revenue Service is already at the center of an abuse-of-power scandal. …ProPublica, a website whose journalism promotes progressive causes, published information from what it said are 15 years of the tax returns of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and other rich Americans. …The story arrives amid the Biden Administration’s effort to pass the largest tax increase as a share of the economy since 1968. …The timing here is no coincidence, comrade. …someone leaked confidential IRS information about individuals to serve a political agenda. This is the same tax agency that pursued a vendetta against conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama Administration. Remember Lois Lerner? This is also the same IRS that Democrats now want to infuse with $80 billion more… As part of this effort, Mr. Biden wants the IRS to collect “gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions.” Why? So the information can be leaked to ProPublica? …Congress should also not trust the IRS with any more power and money than it already has.

And Charles Cooke of National Review also weighs in on the implications of a weaponized and partisan IRS.

We cannot trust the IRS. “Oh, who cares?” you might ask. “The victims are billionaires!” And indeed, they are. But I care. For a start, they’re American citizens, and they’re entitled to the same rights — and protected by the same laws — as everyone else. …Besides, even if one wants to be entirely amoral about it, one should consider that if their information can be spilled onto the Internet, anyone’s can. …A government that is this reckless or sinister with the information of men who are lawyered to the eyeballs is unlikely to worry too much about being reckless or sinister with your information. …The IRS wields an extraordinary amount of power, and there will always be somebody somewhere who thinks that it should be used to advance their favorite political cause. Our refusal to indulge their calls is one of the many things that prevents us from descending into the caprice and chaos of your average banana republic. …Does that bother you? It should.

What’s especially disgusting is that the Biden Administration wants to reward IRS corruption with giant budget increases, bolstered by utterly fraudulent numbers.  Needless to say, that would be a terrible idea (sadly, Republicans in the past have been sympathetic to expanding the size of the tax bureaucracy).

*Financial assets such as stocks generally increase in value because of an expectation of bigger streams of income in the future (such as dividends). Those income streams are taxed (often multiple times) when (and if) they actually materialize.

 

Video: Kudlow on IRS Scandals and Corruption

A Scandal is Brewing at the IRS

  Katie Pavlich Jun 08, 2021

A scandal is brewing at the IRS after confidential tax information belonging to hundreds of Americans, who happen to be some of the richest in the country, has been released and published. ............... 

 It is illegal for the IRS to expose confidential tax information to the public. The IRS Taxpayer Bill of Rights states, "Taxpayers have the right to expect that any information they provide to the IRS will not be disclosed unless authorized by the taxpayer or by law. Taxpayers have the right to expect appropriate action will be taken against employees, return preparers, and others who wrongfully use or disclose taxpayer return information." 

It is unclear how ProPublica got the information, but it was either leaked from inside the agency or hacked. The timing is also suspicious given President Joe Biden's efforts to get Democrats on Capitol Hill onboard with new tax hikes...........To Read More...

Is Cuomo’s Destruction a Dress Rehearsal for Biden?

By Adam Mill February 26, 2021

History failed to record Leon Trotsky’s final thoughts as the ice axe penetrated his skull. But it’s reasonable to suspect that the founding Soviet revolutionary thought something similar to what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo might now be thinking: “Hey guys, I thought we were all on the same side!” Hero Trotsky had a greater claim to revolutionary credibility than Stalin did. Of course, this is why he was destroyed. 

Cuomo rocketed in popularity by providing a vivid contrast to Donald Trump during the days of dueling COVID-19 press conferences. The media swooned over the telegenic but incompetent New York governor. From the beginning, COVID was a tool to take down the Big Bad Orange Man. The media now claim they didn’t report on Cuomo’s COVID scandals because of his “cover-up.” 

What a load of crap. We’ve known since at least last May the essential facts of Cuomo’s deadly policy to force nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients. None of that mattered because the governor looked good on television. So good that he began receiving mentions as a possible last-minute alternative to the ethically and cognitively challenged Democratic front runner, Joe Biden. ..........To Read More....

George Will seems to have missed the corruption of the regime of Obama/Biden

By Jack Hellner
 

I do not recall, the supposedly conservative, serious, intellectual George Will giving a damn about much that Obama/Biden did during their two terms.  He didn't call Obama frivolous, didn't talk about a downward spiral, nor care about all the criminal activities of Obama and his gang, nor did he care about the continuous lies.
But, as with most of the media, everything is Trump's fault.

The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come.

Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation's highest office, this nation is in a downward spiral. This spiral has not reached its nadir, but at least it has reached a point where worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected.

The nation's floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. It is helpful to have this made obvious as voters contemplate renewing the regime's lease on the executive branch. Roger Stone adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not "roll on" Donald Trump. By commuting Stone's sentence, Stone's beneficiary played his part in this down-market drama, showing gratitude for Stone's version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence), which involved lots of speaking but much lying. 

Given Trump's reckless lying and the supine nature of most Republican officeholders, it is imperative that the Nov. 3 result be obvious that evening.

As for lies:

Obama, his minions, and his devotees from the media willingly spread multiple falsehoods about Obamacare for years.

• Obama took lying to new heights with the Iran deal
• 'Corroboration Zero': An Inspector General's Report Reveals the Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke
• BREAKUP OF BLACK FAMILY IMPERILS GAINS OF DECADES
• Yes, this is the slowest U.S. recovery since WWII
• American Airlines Shows The Corruption Of Obama's GM Bailout
• Obama repays donors in tax dollars
• IRS Apologizes For Aggressive Scrutiny Of Conservative Groups
• Clinton gave State Department appointments to 194 donors
• Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State
• Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal
• How five members of Joe Biden's family got rich through his connections
• The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook
• How The Obama Administration Raided The Treasury To Pay Off Insurers
• DACA Is Unconstitutional, as Obama Admitted
• FBI's top lawyer believed Hillary Clinton should face charges, but was talked out of it
• Holder, Clapper, Brennan, Lerner, Comey and others lied to Congress and were above the law. Most of the media not only didn't care, they use and hire these known liars to attack Trump.
• Newly declassified memos detail extent of improper Obama-era NSA spying

 To Read More....

The Biden Boomerang

Editorial of The New York Sun | October 11, 2019

Boomerang. That’s the word for news that Joe Biden is the 2020 Democratic candidate with whom the CIA’s so-called whistleblower had a “professional” tie. The ex-vice president had been holding himself — and his son — out as the wronged parties in this whole contretemps. Now it’s starting to look as if he has been less than forthcoming with the American voters.

We put that in the conditional because a lot of this story needs to be confirmed. The link that went up under a siren on the Drudge Report, though, brings up a report in the Washington Examiner, which quotes intelligence officers and former White House officials. The Examiner has a fine record on this beat, and the report is for Mr. Biden to deny, and forthrightly, if he can.......To Read More......

The Rats are Leaving the Ship

By Frank Friday

The city I live in is sometimes called the biggest little town in the country because everybody seems to know everybody else’s business, but we have nothing on the nation’s capital. After James Comey’s bombshell announcement that thanks to Anthony Wiener’s laptop, the Hillary investigation is back on, who gets drafted by the Clintons to fight back? Jamie Gorelick. Yeah, that Jamie Gorelick, the Clinton’s cover-up artist who left DOJ for the big bucks at Fannie Mae, was involved in everything from the 9/11 hearings to the IRS scandal and was even considered by Obama to run the FBI.  (Today, Ms. Gorelick tells us, James Comey is a threat to our very democracy, but just three years ago, her friend was "one of the great lawyers of the Justice Department.")

Of course, when President Bush came to office he wanted to clear away all the Clinton mess, even appointing a lawyer of immeasurable talent and integrity, he was told, to look into the 2001 Pardongate scandal. A guy by the name of James Comey. It seems he had the goods on Hillary, her brother Hugh, Bill, and his brother Roger. But Mr. Comey went all squishy.......I should think Mr. Comey further understands, no matter who is elected president, he won’t be FBI director much longer, and that is now the least of his concerns......More

Joe Biden and his son Hunter can’t keep their Ukraine story straight

September 22, 2019 By Thomas Lifson

Did Joe Biden discuss his son’s Ukraine business deal with him? Joe said “No” Friday when Fox News Channel’s Peter Doocy caught up with him at an appearance in Iowa.

“Mr. Vice President, how many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?” Doocy asked.

“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said, and as Doocy tried to follow up, the former VP cut him off.

“And here’s what I know, I know Trump deserves to be investigated,” Biden said. “He is violating every basic norm of a president. You should be asking him the question, why is he on the phone with a foreign leader trying to intimidate a foreign leader, if that’s what happened, that appears to be what happened, you should be looking at Trump.”........To Read More....

Cartoon of the Day

Mathgate: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio Caught in Massive Grade Fraud Scandal

by Deroy Murdock and Charles Vavruska May 1, 2019

As education-reform activists prepare to demonstrate at New York’s City Hall on Wednesday, a massive grade-fraud scandal has been exposed in America’s largest public-school system. SOS NYC, an organization that fights the under-education of Gotham’s children, released middle-school ratings using its nascent School Grade Fraud Index (SGFI). The Index divides the percentage of a school’s students who pass their math classes by the percentage of students who pass their New York State math tests. The higher the Index, the greater the fraud. If 100 percent of a middle school’s students pass their math classes and 100 percent of students also pass the state math test, the school would have an SGFI of 1.0. Conversely, if 100 percent of students passed their math classes, but only 1 percent of students passed the state exam, the school’s Index would be 100...............De Blasio also is embroiled in scandal over his mismanagement of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). ............To Read More....
 

No scandals? Biden repeats an old Obama whopper

April 27, 2019 By Monica Showalter

Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden's out and about, repeating the old, tired saws of the Obama administration.

According to Fox News:

Former vice president and newly-minted 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden appeared   on "The View" on Friday morning and told hosts that his proudest moment of serving with President Barack Obama was that there was "not one whisper" of scandal during the time they served together in the White House.

Biden said that, coincidentally, he and Obama both told press on the same day while in different parts of the country that the thing they were most proud of while in the White House was that there was "not one whisper of a scandal."

"Not one," Biden said. "And that's because of Barack." ........

So let's get this straight here: The Benghazi coverup never happened. The IRS targeting of dissidents never happened, either. The Gold River pollution on traditional Native American lands by the EPA never happened. Solyndra never happened. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never had an illegal private server in some guy's bathroom. She never sold 20% of the U.S. uranium supply to Russia, and her bleachbitting of her subpoenaed emails was perfectly scandal-free, as well as her smashing of Blackberries with hammers. The fact that top-secret emails turned up in Anthony Weiner's perverted computer, for the New York cops to read, was a nothingburger. And if you like your doctor... Actually, the Obama administration was probably the most scandal-plagued of all administrations, and for one important reason: .......Read more