It’s Monday, June 14th, 2021…but before we begin, a picture and some prose, from Balls Cotton and our friend Ryan respectively, which bespeak the true nature of the world…
…and our country:
Any questions?!?
Now, owing to the fact we’re dead-dog tired after a long weekend preparing our garage for renovation, here’s a somewhat truncated edition of The Gouge!
“In the most predictable story of the Covid era, it turns out that federal relief programs have been plagued with fraud and abuse. As for waste, well, that was always sort of the point. Shutting down much of the economy and attempting to replace it with federal spending, borrowing and money creation is not a strategy for productivity. But when it comes to the amount of theft, a new estimate really is a surprise—and a truly stunning one.
Criminals may have stolen as much as half of the unemployment benefits the U.S. has been pumping out over the past year, some experts say.
What would we do without experts? This column likes to maintain a robust skepticism regarding government programs, but could the feds really have handed over half the unemployment benefits to crooks? One of Mr. Salmon’s experts suggests that most of the crooks don’t even live here. According to the Axios report:
Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, a service that tries to prevent this kind of fraud, tells Axios that America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims. As much as 50% of all unemployment monies might have been stolen, he says.
Haywood Talcove, the CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, estimates that at least 70% of the money stolen by impostors ultimately left the country, much of it ending up in the hands of criminal syndicates in China, Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere.
“These groups are definitely backed by the state,” Talcove tells Axios.
Much of the rest of the money was stolen by street gangs domestically, who have made up a greater share of the fraudsters in recent months.
If forced to choose, your humble correspondent would probably prefer independent domestic street gangs to foreign state-backed criminal syndicates. But perhaps the economists in the crowd can opine on the relative impact of stuffing U.S. taxpayer money into one pair of undeserving hands versus another. For that matter perhaps the people who endorsed the idea of shuttering much of the U.S. economy in response to Covid-19, expanding the Federal Reserve balance sheet by nearly $4 trillion and adding more than $4 trillion to the nation’s publicly held debt can explain if their strategy depends on whether the recipients of cash are lawful or law-abiding. When one is dumping money out of a helicopter it’s not so easy to dictate who catches it.
The important thing now is for Washingtonians to try to evade responsibility…”
ONE Washingtonian…
…in particular.
Since we’re on the subject of fraud, waste and abuse, NRO‘s Charlie Cooke relates…
“…I may be wrong, but I don’t see Beijing backtracking from this stance, which would require admitting error and repudiating a coverup. It would mean surrendering the party’s time-tested strategy of shifting blame to foreigners for bad outcomes(see Ian Johnson’s account of this aspect of party history in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books).
This will be a high-wire act. Like the lab-leak theory, China’s preferred narrative depends on not finding early cases of Covid or transitional versions of the virus in China.From the start, China’s government was frantic to write a narrative independent of the scientific evidence. Recall the silencing of doctors, the expulsion and jailing of journalists, the destruction of Huanan market. Donald Trump may gripe about the unfairness of Covid arriving in his re-election year but China lacks any orderly means to replace a regime that discredits itself in a national crisis. Its singularly draconian effort to suppress the virus wasn’t because it adopted the attitude of CNN announcers that no cost is too high to prevent a Covid death. It was the prospect of Covid ripping through a country whose intensive-care capacityis 10% of what the U.S. and other Western countries could provide. A second Wuhan, much less 40 of them, might have meant the end of party rule…”
In other words, the tyrannical ChiCom douche pumps who, together with their predecessors, are responsible for more deaths than the REST of the world’s dictators COMBINED, are fighting for their continued capability to personally profit off the pain and torment of the masses. Not so very different than their Progressive American counterparts, eh?!?
Next up, three quick thoughts specially selected for inquiring Conservative minds:
“These patterns mean that poor Black and White adults today have dramatically different family poverty trajectories. Half of Blacks in the bottom fifth of the income distribution have parents and grandparents who were also poor, compared to just 8 percent of poor Whites. We show that the longer the time frame, the starker the racial gaps. More than half a century since the civil rights victories of the 1960s, these racial gaps in poverty and opportunity remain a cause for national shame.“
…we were struck by the fact there was NO mention whatsoever of the undeniable disintegration of the Black family under the impact of the Great Society legislation purportedly intended to eliminate poverty, but by which LBJ clearly intended to RE-enslave Blacks in perpetuity:
“Who wanted Toobin back on air? No one was clamoring for it, calling for it, protesting his departure, or demanding his return. Toobin’s been with CNN since 2002, and his departure should have opened up opportunities for some other lawyer who can explain legal concepts in layman’s terms live on television. If anyone in the media world argued that Toobin had gotten a raw deal, they did so exceptionally quietly.
…Jeffrey Toobin is back for one reason and one reason only: Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, wants him back. Although we should note that CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy wrote, “Some anchors and hosts at CNN also expressed a desire to have Toobin back on their shows, since he has been a leading legal voice on television for decades.” Please name those hosts, host of Reliable Sources. I really want to know which CNN program hosts deemed Jeffrey Toobin so sterling a legal analyst that his actions should be forgiven and quickly forgotten. Which CNN hosts felt Toobin could talk for a few minutes about law cases better than anyone else out there, including all of the women and minority options?…”
This reminds us of Marv Albert, Bill O’Reilly and Nancy Grace, all discredited dinosaurs from a bygone age, inexplicably resurrected for continued service when so many deserving of opportunity were waiting in the wings.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Ed Hickey…
…and Balls Cotton…
…along with this helpful social justice primer courtesy of Breeze Gould:
Congratulations to everyone involved, but a special BZ to our eldest son Jon, who coached the Cardinals’ defense, a critical component in Spring Mill taking an early 9-0 lead on their way to victory!
Magoo
Video of the Day
Tucker and the great Victor Davis Hanson, a TRUE dynamic duo address the growing problem of the government’s indirect evisceration of the First Amendment.
Tales of The Darkside
John Stossel reveals the true nature of social media censorship.
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