I've seen Walter name-dropped quite a bit recently, some in praise for "County Highway" (especially the un-paylled article on Minnesota fraud), others in various year-end reviews as a source of general wisdom and a few X-quotes.
Matt gets consistent mentions at places like Instapundit for articles on Racket, always emphasizing that he is a serious (not so-called) journalist who is constantly digging into hard questions and doing invaluable reporting.
So maybe swan about the studio a bit, take a bow or little victory lap today. You deserve a wider audience.
They actually have quite a wide Substack audience.
Someone like Michael Shellenberger gets only 25-40 comments on any of his widely-spaced Substack articles (which are becoming repetitive and old hat). While Matt and Walter average over 500 comments per article, several times a week.
Does that say something about us as readers/commenters, or about them as writers? Perhaps both.
I don't know how things are measured in the new media economy, but is Matt now at the point where something like a chair or seat at the table on a regular show on CNN or MSNOW or FOX would be a step DOWN? In terms of audience, not to mention prestige, dignity and $$$. ?
Matt's wired differently. Scott gets his cookies off by tangling with the bloviating boors on CNN and Matt's more thoughtful and reflective. I've seen him get dismantaled by the likes of that Hasan guy and Bill Maher b/c they come at you fast and loose and that's just not the way he's built.
Jenning LOVES that kind of shit. He's a football lineman, or a hockey player, and Matt's a hoopster or tennis guy. It just ain't his style, and that ain't his arena.
Furthermore; MSM makes its coin on shoutin' and screamin' in these sorts of panels. People tune in to watch the fights the way they used to with that Jerry guy back in the 90's.
I know what you mean. I prefer written debate to verbal debate because the writing gives me time to think it over. Quickly reactive answers are not always the best.
There is less oversight on new media such as Substack. None, in fact. In some ways, it is the Wild West. That cannot last forever. There are already cracks appearing in this format.
Many of my friends, MN nice "virtue signalers" STILL don't get the importance of this fraud. I do! A lifelong MN Democrat, I can no longer make excuses. I am a public school teacher, for god's sake. A 24 year old who was recently convicted of fraud in the Feeding my Future scandal, AND for attempting to bribe a juror, graduated from my high school. With a 1.75 GPA he went on to a for profit college where he paid some online service to do his homework, earning a diploma (3.5 gpa)...in some medical administration major. Convenient, huh?
So he could further fleece us taxpayers? Get Walz out! It's as if MN liberals have been drinking from a well of "wokeness"......odorless, colorless, tasteless, but deadly all the same. Help!! I am incensed!! Also, we don't need to be providing free school lunches to everyone. I recently taught in a very wealthy district. The amount of food waste was sinful. One of the paraprofessionals gathered up all the apples that landed in the garbage, bagged them up, took them home and scrubbed them, and made a dozen apple pies.
I have to admit, when I was a single mom, the free Minnesota lunches of 2020 began they were very nice, especially if you have a boy who goes back for seconds and thirds, but I also have a girl who eats like a bird, so it was a wash in our family.
Also, I consider myself very liberal and I cannot turn a blind eye to this level of criminal activity.
I am truly curious to know what excuses these good folks make for such criminal fraud. I try hard to understand how the other side thinks, but I just don't get it.
Agree: "if we cant afford auditing of government programs to maximize good, we cant afford the programs."
My solution would be to get rid of federal involvement. Localities should administer and finance social welfare. Fraud happens when there is no skin in the game. You can count on it. Waste, mismanagement, inefficiency are a function of size and taxpayer oversight. It is likely also true that people will tend to care more about their neighbors than any nationally vague category of "most vulnerable."
Fraud will happen even in the smallest group if financial activity is unmonitored. Don't trust anyone with money is probably good advice. One local vestry used a camera to catch a minister with his hands in the till. Urban school systems are notorious. County supervisors and community hospital boards award contracts to themselves as well as friends. Human nature is dealing with the devil.
Speaking of oversight, there was ZERO oversight on $283,000,000,000, that's 283 Billion dollars sent to Ukraine. DEMOCRATS did this. Rand Paul tried to fix it.
Fuck Democrats and their white supremacy, racist, crap. I'm sick of them.
Not much oversight of covid "relief" either. Medicare/Medicaid are rife with fraud. Free money for shovel ready infrastructure projects, etc etc etc. The federal government is popping out of its pants. Its greed seems insatiable.
Walter is correct. I am a Minnesota resident and among all my friends, relatives and most Minnesotans I encounter, they are PISSED! Poor, rich; demographics simply do not matter anymore.
Make no mistake, the farmers, blue-collar laborers, business owners, and those with families trying to find health and food services for their children are no longer making excuses for the corruption and outright neglect by the DFL. And they see those kingpin leaders of this betrayal as Omar, Walz and Ellison.
The scuttlebutt is, they want them all charged, but since Walz put the foxes in charge of the hen house, the likelihood of that would take a friggin' miracle.
I think Minnesota could use a few miracles. Where is our modern day Herb Brooks when we need him?!
They used to say shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations but it can be a whole lot faster than that, esp when times are bad and the vultures circle.
The story of your Grandpa shoots an arrow to the heart.
Tell me about it. Dad often said, he wondered if his family still would have fallen apart and been ravaged by alcoholism if grandpa had not lost the railroad job.
The other side (mom) of the family were from Berlin (Prussian era) and came here to work on the railroad. They had a house and the family stayed intact.
Dad pretty much lived in apartments, government housing, and was evicted often enough to make the local newpapers in the 1940s on occasion.
See Kathy Shega's comment above. I don't understand the contradiction. Is it that Democrats and Republicans now live in 2 completely separate and incompatible bubbles?
The fact is, Washington, Ramsey and Hennepin counties completely control the state. There are a few more very blue counties, but those are the main three.
The remaining counties are either light blue, red or pink.
Minnesota had been light industry and farming, those have been eroded.
Olmsted county where Mayo Clinic is also is blue, and has a very large population more or less in a bubble, contrubuting also to the power of the main three.
The deep blue counties always have a state university, and there is a large bubble protecting them from the reality of fentynal ODs, very few jobs, and people living from county food shelves. I live in one, and yes, there is a very big sphere around those counties who think the problems are firearms, lack of housing, and not enough cultural events and welfare.
Whereas the remaining population hunts, gardens and fishes to supplement food supplies. These people are trying to keep their century farms from land grabbers, and people I'd call conservationist rather than conservative.
My state is similar. Urban and university areas solid blue, remaining counties almost entirely red but gradually bluing with commuters looking for bargain housing - and schools which they proceed to ruin. These are the people who think the electoral college is ruining democracy.
The only way to do that in the inner city is black politicians who can work seriously with the black church to improve people's lives with common sense framing of social issues.
Ann, I would like to add. Please see the attempted federal land grab in of farms in the Richard E. Doerr memorial hardwood forest in Minnesota and surrounding area known as the Driftless.
There is an article in the Winona Post: Why the Driftless National Park was Scrapped.
The government is still trying to take land away from families in Minnesota.
Very sad indeed. The struggle in Minnesota is real. And that goes for Wisconsin too. I live on the border and my Wisconsin farming friends are also struggling.
My family lost their farms in the 1930s. Grandpa got a job on the railroad, but was fired for his handicap (yes, they did that back then). His final job was digging graves with a team of horses.
Matt... of course these systems are filled with fraud. Hundreds of billions spent on higher ed a year, do you look around and feel people are getting educated? 600 billion in medicaid do people seem healthy? Hundreds of billion spent on welfare and affordable housing, has poverty been solved?
Progran after program, here is the reality, social programs are inherently ineffective, because no one spends other peoples money well.
I worked in a govt agency that counted every minute and every penny of child care. It's was an almost impossibly arduous task. Yes, we had to be accountants, cops, psych social workers and to know when "customers" posed a threat to our safety. The software was crap because a state govt has to buy the cheapest option. The job gave me such migraines it pushed me into retirement. IF THE CHILDCARE RIPPED OFF THE STATE, THAT GOVT IS UTTERLY FAILING, COMPLICIT AND CORRUPT.
When you counted. How did you count? In my experience from the medical side the government checks things by having arduous paperwork and reporting for businesses, the paperwork is a tedious headache but at least as far as medical devices it has nothing to do with making you safer. They never actually check anything, they just check if you checked.
Ill give you a for instance from my personal life. I was once with a woman in a particular community. In this community it is common for the men and women to get married religiously but not by the state. The man might be a phatmacist or other well earning professional but the woman has no income on paper, now several of the women in the community who do not work all say they take their child for childcare every day at a childcare place owned by another member of the community, but in fact they dont, the child care place might get used as often as most people use their gym membership but they bill the state as if they are watching the kids 5 days a week.
The childcare facility owner wont give the individuals cash instead they make large donations to thr house of worship and often by gifts for the families who say they are having their kids watched there.
In the communities opinion there is no crime, they did sign their kid up for childcare and arguably they could take their kid to childcare (of course if they all did there would actually only be like 1 childcare professional there for 50 kids). That woman feels she isnt committing fraud because the government pays out childcare based on estimated days the parent says they are using the childcare.
From their point of view it is like free school lunch, you can just feed your own kid and yes we would have also paid for a free lunch for that kid but whose fault is that?
Im reality they know its a scam, the childcare owner makes enormous profit because they are not paying out for actual costs of caring for 50 kids 7 hours a day 5 days a week. The parents know they are getting lavish gifts and donations to their house of worship.
This has been going on for 20 years in Dearborn, go up and have a drink with all the 40 year olds who secretly drink (not supposed to drink in their religion, most do, but just like somemthing you politely pretend doesnt happen) every weekend in Detroit and they will tell you all about it.
It propogates to all areas of life where there is a government dollar that can be snapped up.
We had to see proof of income, not just pay and total hours but a schedule of work hours. Westchester County in NYS has a Bureau of Case Review and a Fraud Unit. The hours of actual employment had to match the day care center log of child attendance. The big problems were with informal child care given by relatives. Enforcing strict rules against poor people in mostly black communities was stressful on 2 counts for me anyway: I could generally see their point of view which was that the govt was being harsh. The social service agency was enforcing NYS law so we had not choice but to do that. I didn't see deliberate scamming although my supervisors and some of my black and Hispanic or Latina co-workers assumed the customers were trying to deceive. I guess I was a typical white liberal female with a graduate degree.
The other insanity was the software, the crappy software that the State bought in the last 3 years of my civil service. The day care providers saw their input end which I couldn't see and I saw what Payment Processing was paying but could never see why payments were cancelled. The phones rang all day from providers complaining about nonpayment and parents complaining about needing childcare providers to get paid so the parent could go to work. Instead of allowing me to see the reason for nonpayment, I had to call Payment Processing but was told they were down to one or two workers and were in charge of paying everything that the County pays for from furniture storage for the newly homeless to things related to County Govt but not even social services.
I remember one certification taking a full year during Covid, communications were so ghastly.
And we were told to not bother the two people at Payment Processing. Many black people, women ran the agency and they had their friends. They could yell at a customer on the phone and that was fine. I once raised my voice at a customer after 5 pm and had to get a lawyer from my CSEA union to protect my job.
During Covid, Governor Andy Cuomo made infinitesimal changes that made us backlog a year of work, just to show he was being sensitive to the effects of Covid on the population. Every time he said to decrease the parent fee by a decimal point, we had to re-do our case loads. Meantime the phones never stopped ringing from frantic cuatomers. And that's just Undercare work.
On top of that was the certification or denial of new applicants who I swear for 20 years ALWAYS said the different fathers of their children we No Good, not good men. But they took the last name of the kids' fathers for their kids. Why, somebody tell me PLEASE (this still bugs me years after retirement) why would you not fill out the application form if you know you will otherwise be denied? Codependent NYS always kissing ass like true blue libetards even reduced the applications from 16 to 12 pages.
By the time I left, the state was requiring that we do complex accounting with no guidance.
Some troublemaking customers knew how to make the caseworker look bad and the supervisor and manager had to take the customer's side blame the worker because they couldn't acknowledge that the system was so fucked up.
Being white was really rough in that environment. And I liked black people so I hung in there. I was divorced with 2 kids, one on the Spectrum with a violently oppositional personality.
I don't know how I survived.
If I gave too much info and went beyond your question, I'm just still too tired. Now I'm a big MAGA and Trump supporter and am exhausted by the asinine half of the country that loves Kamala and Candace Freaking Owens
Exactly. No-one cares but taxpayers sick and tired of forking over “free" government money. The federal government has grossly overstepped its constitutional authorities: national defense, managing foreign policy, regulating interstate commerce, coining money, establishing post offices, and creating federal courts. All other responsibilities should revert to the states.
I worked for an NGO and felt the same way. Work ended at 5pm and from 4:30 on, we were simply accounting for our every movement that day. But any poor jobber in the private sector is just as unhappy for other reasons.
The only "happy" people is a very small percentage of completely independent artists (in the large sense of anyone in a creative trade)
Sorry to bring back the flag issue. But it struck me back when it was done. It is so freaking obvious! If I had the artistic/tech skills, I'd create a video of the Minnesota flag transforming into the Somali flag. It's just too way to glaring to be a "coincidence".
I used to subscribe online to The NYT and WaPo. I now avoid them like the plague and wish I had a kind of radiation badge to track my cumulative exposure to their headlines as I scroll past them.
The fraud in Minnesota is made worse by the fact that it was done by incompetents. Really dumb people. For example, one of the FoF restaurants that had to fake supplying meals had a bottle neck in getting the bucks administered by the MN DOE. The bottle neck was that every meal had to be attached to a name. Just a name, these were kids, no DL or state ID number required, just a name, and the fraudsters were having a hard time making up enough names. They literally did not have the brain power to write a simple Python script that a not especially intelligent high schooler could do. They were having sessions where they made up names and wrote them down.
Now one of those poor put upon daycares was broken into and all its records were stolen, sadly making further investigation impossible. It’s the fault of the racists of course.
Matt and Walter - thank you. I look forward to this broadcast weekly. Keep doing great work and having real conversations. Its fantastic and there is nothing else like it.
Nick Shirley's video has now become a meta-media story, in that the video itself and its 100M views are a huge news story in itself and at some point the MSM has to report at least on that aspect of it, not to mention the subtance of Shirley's investigation.
But, with the exception of the NYPost, crickets. It's so astonishing that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune just published their "Year-in-Review" and there was NOTHING about any fraud prosecusions in MN, didn't make the top 50 news stories according to them.
I'd love to hear a little BTS from Walter about that piece, when it was comissioned, how long it took to research and write, and what editorial input he or others at CH had into its publication.
How on earth did Dem VP vetting miss the largest state fraud in US history, or did they cover it up, because Tim was Kamala's choice? If Merrick Garland knew, how did Kamala not know, or did they both ignore it? Moreover, how did Rep opposition research miss it?
Minnesota has fewer than 6 million people in it. The Dallas metro area is larger. A fraud of billions should have rung bells all over the state for years, unless the Powers that Be ignored the grift, in exchange for votes.
Now the show needs to hit the road. Minnesota is not the only state knee deep in graft. Federal Rep staffers should be auditing every federal dollars spent in States, in order of magnitude. CA would be first.
The Democrats don't seem to think of it as fraud. I try so hard to understand the logic that drives modern Democrats but I find it just too weird to wrap my head around. In the old days I could disagree with Democrats but understand where they were coming from. These days they seem like Pavlov's dogs.
...complicated story, I think ... in September (20) of 2022 when the DOJ announced the first indictments with FOF ... the media was wrapped around the raid at Mara a Lago and impending indictments by L James ... raid was August 2022 and James announces civil fraud case against POTUS on September 21, 2022 ... by the time Walz was *vetted* by the democrats and Harris chose him as a running partner ... only ONE trial had been held in the FOF case although half of originally indicted had pled guilty ...
There are some thoughts out there that Walz was chosen for VP nominee because of his access to dark dirty money. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire. Something to keep in the back of the mind. It is quite clear that Walz is not red white and blue American.
Re Walter's comment about us teaching them how to commit fraud, I have long been of the persuasion that it is the opposite. I have watched government over the last 40 years become more and more corrupted. As someone who has spent the last 20 years with immigrants from all over the globe, I am convinced that they brought more in their baggage than just clothes and personal items. They brought with them the ancestral biases and hatreds and their way of doing business.They taught us.
Regarding all this fraud, does the government no longer hire accountants who pay attention? Are there no forensic accountants who are honest and would be stopping it closer to the beginning rather than waiting until it was too big to ignore?
May I suggest Don Surber, Klusterfuck Nation, and C&C for their takes on this MN fraud.
I find some of the connectors suggested by Walter to be very interesting....water runs deep.
Walz was chosen because he was stupid and docile. Harris was tolerated because she was stupid and docile. My guess is that the same people running Biden were planning to run Harris/Walz.
Governments are way too obsessed with TALKING TO the people rather than serving the people. In Canada, our new Prime Minister tweets more than Trump ever did.
I've seen Walter name-dropped quite a bit recently, some in praise for "County Highway" (especially the un-paylled article on Minnesota fraud), others in various year-end reviews as a source of general wisdom and a few X-quotes.
Matt gets consistent mentions at places like Instapundit for articles on Racket, always emphasizing that he is a serious (not so-called) journalist who is constantly digging into hard questions and doing invaluable reporting.
So maybe swan about the studio a bit, take a bow or little victory lap today. You deserve a wider audience.
They actually have quite a wide Substack audience.
Someone like Michael Shellenberger gets only 25-40 comments on any of his widely-spaced Substack articles (which are becoming repetitive and old hat). While Matt and Walter average over 500 comments per article, several times a week.
Does that say something about us as readers/commenters, or about them as writers? Perhaps both.
I don't know how things are measured in the new media economy, but is Matt now at the point where something like a chair or seat at the table on a regular show on CNN or MSNOW or FOX would be a step DOWN? In terms of audience, not to mention prestige, dignity and $$$. ?
A more concise way to ask: Matt, if you could trade places with Scott Jennings, would you?
Matt's wired differently. Scott gets his cookies off by tangling with the bloviating boors on CNN and Matt's more thoughtful and reflective. I've seen him get dismantaled by the likes of that Hasan guy and Bill Maher b/c they come at you fast and loose and that's just not the way he's built.
Jenning LOVES that kind of shit. He's a football lineman, or a hockey player, and Matt's a hoopster or tennis guy. It just ain't his style, and that ain't his arena.
Furthermore; MSM makes its coin on shoutin' and screamin' in these sorts of panels. People tune in to watch the fights the way they used to with that Jerry guy back in the 90's.
Neither Matt nor Walter are built that way.
I know what you mean. I prefer written debate to verbal debate because the writing gives me time to think it over. Quickly reactive answers are not always the best.
Two different talents though some are good at both. Matt is a writer.
and that's why I enjoy this show
Good way to put it. Some people just want controversy, any new information is optional.
I admire Matt greatly, but he's not adept at all at verbal back-and-forth.
There is less oversight on new media such as Substack. None, in fact. In some ways, it is the Wild West. That cannot last forever. There are already cracks appearing in this format.
The new media rules and structure are being made-up as they go along, it seems.
Many of my friends, MN nice "virtue signalers" STILL don't get the importance of this fraud. I do! A lifelong MN Democrat, I can no longer make excuses. I am a public school teacher, for god's sake. A 24 year old who was recently convicted of fraud in the Feeding my Future scandal, AND for attempting to bribe a juror, graduated from my high school. With a 1.75 GPA he went on to a for profit college where he paid some online service to do his homework, earning a diploma (3.5 gpa)...in some medical administration major. Convenient, huh?
So he could further fleece us taxpayers? Get Walz out! It's as if MN liberals have been drinking from a well of "wokeness"......odorless, colorless, tasteless, but deadly all the same. Help!! I am incensed!! Also, we don't need to be providing free school lunches to everyone. I recently taught in a very wealthy district. The amount of food waste was sinful. One of the paraprofessionals gathered up all the apples that landed in the garbage, bagged them up, took them home and scrubbed them, and made a dozen apple pies.
I have to admit, when I was a single mom, the free Minnesota lunches of 2020 began they were very nice, especially if you have a boy who goes back for seconds and thirds, but I also have a girl who eats like a bird, so it was a wash in our family.
Also, I consider myself very liberal and I cannot turn a blind eye to this level of criminal activity.
A fellow Minnesotan here. Only one friend that I have encountered thus far is still making excuses for Walz and company.
My dad used to canvas the county for the DFL. I am so glad my parents are not alive to see this.
They get it. They just feel compelled to minimize it because it’s coming from their tribe. It’s pretty pathetic.
I am truly curious to know what excuses these good folks make for such criminal fraud. I try hard to understand how the other side thinks, but I just don't get it.
As a fellow democrat who wants our party back, if we cant afford auditing of government programs to maximize good, we cant afford the programs.
Having our most vulnerable held hostage because fraud needs to baked in is the lowest of low standards.
Agree: "if we cant afford auditing of government programs to maximize good, we cant afford the programs."
My solution would be to get rid of federal involvement. Localities should administer and finance social welfare. Fraud happens when there is no skin in the game. You can count on it. Waste, mismanagement, inefficiency are a function of size and taxpayer oversight. It is likely also true that people will tend to care more about their neighbors than any nationally vague category of "most vulnerable."
I would add that thousands of elected government fraud/bribery/etc are prosecuted at the state and local levels every year.
On the federal level? You literally need gold bars in your jacket pockets to be prosecuted.
Fraud will happen even in the smallest group if financial activity is unmonitored. Don't trust anyone with money is probably good advice. One local vestry used a camera to catch a minister with his hands in the till. Urban school systems are notorious. County supervisors and community hospital boards award contracts to themselves as well as friends. Human nature is dealing with the devil.
Lol - are you sure you're a Democrat?
Didn’t see the Somali fraud scandal being renamed as ‘white supremacy’ coming. The Barney Fife communist (Walz) strikes again.
this literally made me nauseous
I think he makes Himself nauseous Alway looks on the verge of crying.
That was pretty easy to foresee. If there's any possible opportunity to play the race card, no matter how in applicable, they will do it.
Speaking of oversight, there was ZERO oversight on $283,000,000,000, that's 283 Billion dollars sent to Ukraine. DEMOCRATS did this. Rand Paul tried to fix it.
Fuck Democrats and their white supremacy, racist, crap. I'm sick of them.
Not much oversight of covid "relief" either. Medicare/Medicaid are rife with fraud. Free money for shovel ready infrastructure projects, etc etc etc. The federal government is popping out of its pants. Its greed seems insatiable.
Walter is correct. I am a Minnesota resident and among all my friends, relatives and most Minnesotans I encounter, they are PISSED! Poor, rich; demographics simply do not matter anymore.
Make no mistake, the farmers, blue-collar laborers, business owners, and those with families trying to find health and food services for their children are no longer making excuses for the corruption and outright neglect by the DFL. And they see those kingpin leaders of this betrayal as Omar, Walz and Ellison.
The scuttlebutt is, they want them all charged, but since Walz put the foxes in charge of the hen house, the likelihood of that would take a friggin' miracle.
I think Minnesota could use a few miracles. Where is our modern day Herb Brooks when we need him?!
So many of us are PISSED and FRUSTRATED because we see no way to fix it. There is real anger brewing and that usually doesn't end well.
They used to say shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations but it can be a whole lot faster than that, esp when times are bad and the vultures circle.
The story of your Grandpa shoots an arrow to the heart.
Tell me about it. Dad often said, he wondered if his family still would have fallen apart and been ravaged by alcoholism if grandpa had not lost the railroad job.
The other side (mom) of the family were from Berlin (Prussian era) and came here to work on the railroad. They had a house and the family stayed intact.
Dad pretty much lived in apartments, government housing, and was evicted often enough to make the local newpapers in the 1940s on occasion.
The great depression was devastating to so many families. People today who claim "hard times" don't know what hard times are.
See Kathy Shega's comment above. I don't understand the contradiction. Is it that Democrats and Republicans now live in 2 completely separate and incompatible bubbles?
The fact is, Washington, Ramsey and Hennepin counties completely control the state. There are a few more very blue counties, but those are the main three.
The remaining counties are either light blue, red or pink.
Minnesota had been light industry and farming, those have been eroded.
Olmsted county where Mayo Clinic is also is blue, and has a very large population more or less in a bubble, contrubuting also to the power of the main three.
The deep blue counties always have a state university, and there is a large bubble protecting them from the reality of fentynal ODs, very few jobs, and people living from county food shelves. I live in one, and yes, there is a very big sphere around those counties who think the problems are firearms, lack of housing, and not enough cultural events and welfare.
Whereas the remaining population hunts, gardens and fishes to supplement food supplies. These people are trying to keep their century farms from land grabbers, and people I'd call conservationist rather than conservative.
My state is similar. Urban and university areas solid blue, remaining counties almost entirely red but gradually bluing with commuters looking for bargain housing - and schools which they proceed to ruin. These are the people who think the electoral college is ruining democracy.
“These are the people who think the electoral college is ruining democracy.”
Bingo! Their wettest dream of wet dreams is to get rid of the EC. All should beware.
This is spot on, Ann.
This is why Republicans *must* make inroads in the metro and other so-called blue districts.
Agree. Hope they get their poop in a group.
The only way to do that in the inner city is black politicians who can work seriously with the black church to improve people's lives with common sense framing of social issues.
Academia is probably a lost cause.
Ann, I would like to add. Please see the attempted federal land grab in of farms in the Richard E. Doerr memorial hardwood forest in Minnesota and surrounding area known as the Driftless.
There is an article in the Winona Post: Why the Driftless National Park was Scrapped.
The government is still trying to take land away from families in Minnesota.
Development here lines the pockets of supervisors. Property taxes are unsustainable. We hoped to die on the family farm but it's not looking likely.
Very sad indeed. The struggle in Minnesota is real. And that goes for Wisconsin too. I live on the border and my Wisconsin farming friends are also struggling.
My family lost their farms in the 1930s. Grandpa got a job on the railroad, but was fired for his handicap (yes, they did that back then). His final job was digging graves with a team of horses.
Land owner to federal laborer to ditch digger.
I thought Bari gave a very good reason why it wasn’t to be aired. It was very logical.
agree. She supports journalism, not propaganda
Bari has always been a propagandist.
Sharyl Attkisson has a great Substack on the whole 60 minutes story
Matt... of course these systems are filled with fraud. Hundreds of billions spent on higher ed a year, do you look around and feel people are getting educated? 600 billion in medicaid do people seem healthy? Hundreds of billion spent on welfare and affordable housing, has poverty been solved?
Progran after program, here is the reality, social programs are inherently ineffective, because no one spends other peoples money well.
The Great Society is the gift that keeps on giving. LBJ was one if the greatest fraudsters of all time.
I worked in a govt agency that counted every minute and every penny of child care. It's was an almost impossibly arduous task. Yes, we had to be accountants, cops, psych social workers and to know when "customers" posed a threat to our safety. The software was crap because a state govt has to buy the cheapest option. The job gave me such migraines it pushed me into retirement. IF THE CHILDCARE RIPPED OFF THE STATE, THAT GOVT IS UTTERLY FAILING, COMPLICIT AND CORRUPT.
When you counted. How did you count? In my experience from the medical side the government checks things by having arduous paperwork and reporting for businesses, the paperwork is a tedious headache but at least as far as medical devices it has nothing to do with making you safer. They never actually check anything, they just check if you checked.
Ill give you a for instance from my personal life. I was once with a woman in a particular community. In this community it is common for the men and women to get married religiously but not by the state. The man might be a phatmacist or other well earning professional but the woman has no income on paper, now several of the women in the community who do not work all say they take their child for childcare every day at a childcare place owned by another member of the community, but in fact they dont, the child care place might get used as often as most people use their gym membership but they bill the state as if they are watching the kids 5 days a week.
The childcare facility owner wont give the individuals cash instead they make large donations to thr house of worship and often by gifts for the families who say they are having their kids watched there.
In the communities opinion there is no crime, they did sign their kid up for childcare and arguably they could take their kid to childcare (of course if they all did there would actually only be like 1 childcare professional there for 50 kids). That woman feels she isnt committing fraud because the government pays out childcare based on estimated days the parent says they are using the childcare.
From their point of view it is like free school lunch, you can just feed your own kid and yes we would have also paid for a free lunch for that kid but whose fault is that?
Im reality they know its a scam, the childcare owner makes enormous profit because they are not paying out for actual costs of caring for 50 kids 7 hours a day 5 days a week. The parents know they are getting lavish gifts and donations to their house of worship.
This has been going on for 20 years in Dearborn, go up and have a drink with all the 40 year olds who secretly drink (not supposed to drink in their religion, most do, but just like somemthing you politely pretend doesnt happen) every weekend in Detroit and they will tell you all about it.
It propogates to all areas of life where there is a government dollar that can be snapped up.
We had to see proof of income, not just pay and total hours but a schedule of work hours. Westchester County in NYS has a Bureau of Case Review and a Fraud Unit. The hours of actual employment had to match the day care center log of child attendance. The big problems were with informal child care given by relatives. Enforcing strict rules against poor people in mostly black communities was stressful on 2 counts for me anyway: I could generally see their point of view which was that the govt was being harsh. The social service agency was enforcing NYS law so we had not choice but to do that. I didn't see deliberate scamming although my supervisors and some of my black and Hispanic or Latina co-workers assumed the customers were trying to deceive. I guess I was a typical white liberal female with a graduate degree.
The other insanity was the software, the crappy software that the State bought in the last 3 years of my civil service. The day care providers saw their input end which I couldn't see and I saw what Payment Processing was paying but could never see why payments were cancelled. The phones rang all day from providers complaining about nonpayment and parents complaining about needing childcare providers to get paid so the parent could go to work. Instead of allowing me to see the reason for nonpayment, I had to call Payment Processing but was told they were down to one or two workers and were in charge of paying everything that the County pays for from furniture storage for the newly homeless to things related to County Govt but not even social services.
I remember one certification taking a full year during Covid, communications were so ghastly.
And we were told to not bother the two people at Payment Processing. Many black people, women ran the agency and they had their friends. They could yell at a customer on the phone and that was fine. I once raised my voice at a customer after 5 pm and had to get a lawyer from my CSEA union to protect my job.
During Covid, Governor Andy Cuomo made infinitesimal changes that made us backlog a year of work, just to show he was being sensitive to the effects of Covid on the population. Every time he said to decrease the parent fee by a decimal point, we had to re-do our case loads. Meantime the phones never stopped ringing from frantic cuatomers. And that's just Undercare work.
On top of that was the certification or denial of new applicants who I swear for 20 years ALWAYS said the different fathers of their children we No Good, not good men. But they took the last name of the kids' fathers for their kids. Why, somebody tell me PLEASE (this still bugs me years after retirement) why would you not fill out the application form if you know you will otherwise be denied? Codependent NYS always kissing ass like true blue libetards even reduced the applications from 16 to 12 pages.
By the time I left, the state was requiring that we do complex accounting with no guidance.
Some troublemaking customers knew how to make the caseworker look bad and the supervisor and manager had to take the customer's side blame the worker because they couldn't acknowledge that the system was so fucked up.
Being white was really rough in that environment. And I liked black people so I hung in there. I was divorced with 2 kids, one on the Spectrum with a violently oppositional personality.
I don't know how I survived.
If I gave too much info and went beyond your question, I'm just still too tired. Now I'm a big MAGA and Trump supporter and am exhausted by the asinine half of the country that loves Kamala and Candace Freaking Owens
Exactly. No-one cares but taxpayers sick and tired of forking over “free" government money. The federal government has grossly overstepped its constitutional authorities: national defense, managing foreign policy, regulating interstate commerce, coining money, establishing post offices, and creating federal courts. All other responsibilities should revert to the states.
I worked for an NGO and felt the same way. Work ended at 5pm and from 4:30 on, we were simply accounting for our every movement that day. But any poor jobber in the private sector is just as unhappy for other reasons.
The only "happy" people is a very small percentage of completely independent artists (in the large sense of anyone in a creative trade)
Sorry to bring back the flag issue. But it struck me back when it was done. It is so freaking obvious! If I had the artistic/tech skills, I'd create a video of the Minnesota flag transforming into the Somali flag. It's just too way to glaring to be a "coincidence".
I used to subscribe online to The NYT and WaPo. I now avoid them like the plague and wish I had a kind of radiation badge to track my cumulative exposure to their headlines as I scroll past them.
The fraud in Minnesota is made worse by the fact that it was done by incompetents. Really dumb people. For example, one of the FoF restaurants that had to fake supplying meals had a bottle neck in getting the bucks administered by the MN DOE. The bottle neck was that every meal had to be attached to a name. Just a name, these were kids, no DL or state ID number required, just a name, and the fraudsters were having a hard time making up enough names. They literally did not have the brain power to write a simple Python script that a not especially intelligent high schooler could do. They were having sessions where they made up names and wrote them down.
Now one of those poor put upon daycares was broken into and all its records were stolen, sadly making further investigation impossible. It’s the fault of the racists of course.
Matt and Walter - thank you. I look forward to this broadcast weekly. Keep doing great work and having real conversations. Its fantastic and there is nothing else like it.
Duh! Bari was protecting Zionisa Ellison.
Better talk about Nick Shirley's reporting on the Somali day care fraud and Tanpon Tim's involvement.
Nick Shirley's video has now become a meta-media story, in that the video itself and its 100M views are a huge news story in itself and at some point the MSM has to report at least on that aspect of it, not to mention the subtance of Shirley's investigation.
But, with the exception of the NYPost, crickets. It's so astonishing that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune just published their "Year-in-Review" and there was NOTHING about any fraud prosecusions in MN, didn't make the top 50 news stories according to them.
County Highway had the same story almost two months ago!
I'd love to hear a little BTS from Walter about that piece, when it was comissioned, how long it took to research and write, and what editorial input he or others at CH had into its publication.
Yes, and many follow-up stories are taking note of that (While also praising Armin Rosen's piece.)
https://www.countyhighway.com/archive/volume-3/issue-3/the-shame-of-our-cities-rosen
How on earth did Dem VP vetting miss the largest state fraud in US history, or did they cover it up, because Tim was Kamala's choice? If Merrick Garland knew, how did Kamala not know, or did they both ignore it? Moreover, how did Rep opposition research miss it?
Minnesota has fewer than 6 million people in it. The Dallas metro area is larger. A fraud of billions should have rung bells all over the state for years, unless the Powers that Be ignored the grift, in exchange for votes.
Now the show needs to hit the road. Minnesota is not the only state knee deep in graft. Federal Rep staffers should be auditing every federal dollars spent in States, in order of magnitude. CA would be first.
The Democrats don't seem to think of it as fraud. I try so hard to understand the logic that drives modern Democrats but I find it just too weird to wrap my head around. In the old days I could disagree with Democrats but understand where they were coming from. These days they seem like Pavlov's dogs.
They did. I talked to minority GOP reps who had been trying to raise alarms since 2020 about abuses. Crickets.
...complicated story, I think ... in September (20) of 2022 when the DOJ announced the first indictments with FOF ... the media was wrapped around the raid at Mara a Lago and impending indictments by L James ... raid was August 2022 and James announces civil fraud case against POTUS on September 21, 2022 ... by the time Walz was *vetted* by the democrats and Harris chose him as a running partner ... only ONE trial had been held in the FOF case although half of originally indicted had pled guilty ...
I would think following the money would be a better job for AI than writing kids' essays.
Eager to get Walt's Minnesotan take; here's my Californian one while you wait: https://aynsrants.substack.com/p/should-i-open-a-daycare
But/and yes, I'm just now also taking in that great County Hwy piece I hadn't realized was actually available online...
There are some thoughts out there that Walz was chosen for VP nominee because of his access to dark dirty money. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire. Something to keep in the back of the mind. It is quite clear that Walz is not red white and blue American.
Re Walter's comment about us teaching them how to commit fraud, I have long been of the persuasion that it is the opposite. I have watched government over the last 40 years become more and more corrupted. As someone who has spent the last 20 years with immigrants from all over the globe, I am convinced that they brought more in their baggage than just clothes and personal items. They brought with them the ancestral biases and hatreds and their way of doing business.They taught us.
Regarding all this fraud, does the government no longer hire accountants who pay attention? Are there no forensic accountants who are honest and would be stopping it closer to the beginning rather than waiting until it was too big to ignore?
May I suggest Don Surber, Klusterfuck Nation, and C&C for their takes on this MN fraud.
I find some of the connectors suggested by Walter to be very interesting....water runs deep.
Walz was chosen because he was stupid and docile. Harris was tolerated because she was stupid and docile. My guess is that the same people running Biden were planning to run Harris/Walz.
Governments are way too obsessed with TALKING TO the people rather than serving the people. In Canada, our new Prime Minister tweets more than Trump ever did.
They talk talk talk
They buy trans flags
Democracy is dead.
Looking forward to more Epstein hand waving and nose holding- check Drop Site News for actual reportage!