Carr: Let Herald check welfare tips
Sunday, May 12, 2013 By: Howie Carr
I have a modest proposal for the Department of Terrorist, er Transitional Assistance (DTA).
Turn your telephone tip line over to the Herald.
It has become painfully obvious over the past 18 months that the DTA and Gov. Deval Patrick have zero interest in cracking down on waste, fraud and abuse in the welfare department.
What could account for this abject dereliction of duty? Professional courtesy, perhaps? More concern for illegal aliens and terrorists than the taxpayers?
Maybe Deval et al. really do believe that these crimes are but “anecdotes,” as the governor insists upon calling them. Ten percent of the 480,000 entities getting EBT cards turn out to have no current addresses, or maybe they just don’t exist. Whatever, it’s just a little “leakage,” as the governor says with a shrug.
Given this attitude, it’s no surprise that the DTA tip line, so-called, is where tips go to die.
Consider the latest outrage last week. A Dedham cop named Bob Walsh participated in the bust of an illegal alien Dominican drug dealer. This undocumented Democrat had been deported once and returned. In his apartment the cops found $65,000 in cash, 50 grams of heroin, 45 grams of cocaine … and an EBT card for his illegal-alien galpal.
Detective Walsh made his first call to the “tip line” five weeks ago. When the phone didn’t ring, he knew it was the DTA. All it took to finally get action was a front-page story in this newspaper Thursday. First the DTA refused to say anything about the case. After the page-one story appeared, the DTA claimed they’d already referred Walsh’s heads-up to the state auditor’s investigations bureau.
But the crack sleuth who called Walsh said he’d just been handed the case that morning, after the paper hit the newsstands.
Now the powers that be claim to be shocked, shocked that illegal aliens are obtaining EBT cards. Maybe they should have driven over to South Boston and asked Auntie Zeituni how it’s done.
Or they could have spoken to state Rep. Shaunna O’Connell (R-Taunton).
“It’s pretty obvious,” she said on Friday. “If you don’t have a Social Security number, they give you a ‘placeholder’ number. That means anybody can get an EBT card.”
Last year the Legislature considered a bill to prevent EBT cardholders from getting cash with their Everything-Free-in-America plastic. How mean-spirited, the moonbats whined, voting down the amendment. Now it turns out the Tsarnaev brothers went on a cash spree with their EBT cards before the bombings.
Considering that Tamerlan’s occupation is listed on his death certificate as “Never Worked,” where do you suppose he got the money to build his pressure-cooker bombs? Most likely from the very people he killed and maimed — American taxpayers.
We at the Herald couldn’t possibly do a worse job than the Department of Terrorist Assistance does in policing the non-working classes. These DTA pencil-pushers aren’t watchdogs, they’re lapdogs, and that’s just the way the Democrats, from former welfare-recipient Deval on down, like it.
Meanwhile, the ACLU of Massachusetts is weighing in … on the high cost of putting photo IDs on EBT cards. It would cost so very much — $4 million. So I suppose the American Civil Liberties Union is even more opposed to spending $275 million yearly on welfare for illegal aliens, the House Republicans’ lowball estimate of the cost to Massachusetts taxpayers.
In its “alert” to the bleeding hearts, the ACLU says that photo IDs, which are required to do anything in this society except vote and collect free money, would “stigmatize people who receive government assistance,” you know, like the galpals of once-deported illegal-alien Dominican drug dealers with $65,000 lying around their apartments.
The ACLU continues: “Putting photos on EBT cards will not solve perceived problems of program fraud.”
Note that adjective “perceived.” In other words, there really isn’t a problem in the welfare department, it’s all just … anecdotes.
So I beseech the Legislature, let the Herald take over the DTA tip line. We’ll even change the name to something more palatable. How does the Anecdote Line sound? The Perceived Anecdote Line?
It’s time to bring privatization back to the hackerama of state government.
Carr: Targeted by feds? Join the club
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 By: Howie Carr
These so-called “journalists” in D.C. must have led very sheltered lives if they’ve never had the feds looking for their sources and/or auditing them.
Or maybe because 98 percent of them drink the Obama Kool-Aid, they’ve always figured they were safe. You can’t really blame the AP for feeling like a battered spouse. Five years of kneepad reporting, 24/7 obsequious fawning to Dear Leader, and now Eric Holder kicks them down the stairs like they’re Michael Savage or somebody.
The FBI opened a jacket on me when I was 23 — they wanted to know where I was getting Army files that I was using in stories about the Black Panther Party. It was a pro forma call. They knew I wouldn’t tell them. No hard feelings on either side.
But the audits … those are something else.
The first time the feds came after me, I was a reporter for Ch. 7. My local state rep had been indicted for attempted extortion, and I was covering the trial. One evening I was in an editing suite, putting together a piece based on what the feds believed was sealed grand jury testimony about my solon. The phone rang and it was an assistant U.S. attorney.
“You run that story and you’re in big trouble,” he said.
I thanked him for his concern and hung up. The next morning the prosecutor stormed up to me in the courtroom and snarled: “You still live in Somerville, don’t you?”
A week later, I got a letter from the IRS saying that I was being audited. I took the letter to court the next day and showed it to my state rep’s defense lawyer. He didn’t seem surprised. He took a letter out of his pocket — it was from the IRS, too.
“Let me handle this,” he said. He wrote a scorching letter to the IRS, demanding to know how he’d been singled out. Then he wrote the same letter on my behalf. And that was the last either of us ever heard from the IRS. My accountant kept calling the pencil-pusher who had signed the letter, but he would never even return the call.
A few years later, the obnoxious prosecutor was nominated for a judgeship. I called up the lawyer and asked him what we were going to do.
“We’re going to own a judge!” he said happily.
The next time it happened, it was a state beef. The state revenue department started sniffing around the Southern Registry in East Cambridge, trying to find out if I was putting three-deckers in Somerville in the names of straws — namely, one of my daughters.
Apparently they thought my last name was Winter, not Carr. Then I ran into a couple of DOR guys in a barroom in Harvard Square. They told me it was an ex-state rep who was targeting me, and that his two minions, the ones who’d been skulking around the courthouse, had already been suspended.
I called my friend the lawyer, and he phoned the DOR and told them he knew everything. They were embarrassed. Everything went away. But I’m still waiting for my apology, for both my apologies.
Welcome to the real world, moonbats.