Replies

Sun. column ping

You can’t ‘scrub’ up EBT mess with a dirty rag
by Howie Carr
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Another day, another 19,000 anecdotes.

Anecdote — that’s Gov. Deval Patrick’s favorite word to describe any scandal involving EBT cards and his constituents. It doesn’t matter how solid the information is, how many law-enforcement agencies are involved in the takedown, he always shrugs off the latest rip-off of the taxpayers.

Anecdote.

And now he’s looking at another 19,000 of them — that 4 percent of the welfare community that the Department of Transitional Assistance (a name that grows ever more preposterous) could not locate.

Those 19,000 MIA’s collect — based on an average of $400 a month — $91 million a year. That’s the estimate of Rep. Shauna O’Connell (R-Taunton). But the governor Friday went into his best pooh-pooh mode.

“That may not be indicative of a problem,” he said with a straight face. “We’ll know when we do the scrubbing.”

Scrubbing? More like a sponge bath would be my guess. This is a program that needs a good cold shower. But the governor, himself a former welfare recipient, recommends … nothing, basically. Call it professional courtesy.

Let’s not forget how the “scrubbing” began. Granny Warren’s daughter filed a lawsuit claiming the DTA hadn’t been proactive enough in registering the state’s assorted loafers and layabouts to vote for her carpetbagging fake-Indian mom. Then — bingo, the hacks located $274,000 for mailings, complete with post-paid envelopes for the gimme girls and guys to send back their voter registrations.

Have you ever gotten a post-paid envelope from the commonwealth? No, I didn’t think so. They’re not for taxpayers, just for the non-working classes to take part in a Democratic voter-registration drive.

The Patrick administration has known about these appalling EBT numbers for months now. They were only released after this newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request. Which is the same way it was revealed that Lt. Gov. Tim Murray was doing 108 mph when he mysteriously crashed his state vehicle in November 2011.

So much for transparency at the State House.

It takes months for a law-abiding citizen to get a gun permit in this state. But if you sign up for welfare with a fake name or address, no problemo. Nobody ever checks up, apparently.

When Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York in 1993, he insisted that all welfare recipients show up in person to renew their applications. A quarter of the “recipients” never appeared. It’s hard to respond to a letter if you don’t really exist.

I know, that’s just an “anecdote.” So here’s one more. Years ago when the transit cops in New York and New Jersey started busting fare-jumpers, they made an astounding discovery. A quarter — there’s that number again — of those arrested were carrying welfare cards from both New York and New Jersey. In other words, they were collecting in two states.

And now the Mass. welfare rolls will get a “scrubbing” — wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Here’s what really matters to Deval and his gang of plunderers. On Thursday, as soon as the successor to the outgoing watchdog of the Governor’s Council, Mary-Ellen Manning, was sworn in, the governor nominated Mary Beth Heffernan for a judgeship.

Yes, that Mary Beth Heffernan, probably the worst public-safety secretary in state history. Too incompetent to properly broom Tim Murray’s auto accident or Annie Dookhan or the Sheila Burgess bad-driving fiasco, so they give her early retirement on the bench for $130,000 a year.

Taking care of dodgy old hacks, that’s what Deval et al. are about, not cleaning up the disaster that is the welfare state.

By the way, I still haven’t heard back from Deval on my generous offer to provide him with one hour per month on my radio talk show to explain how wonderful he and his administration are.

Governor, the offer stands.