Posted on 05/17/2013 4:34:31 AM PDT by raccoonradio
Nobody seems to be considering the possiblity that the cards issued to Necro-Americans were actually in the hands of Department of Terrorist Assistance employees. (I refrain from calling them “workers”.) This is like the lottery scandal, under Joe Malone, where millions of dollars in lottery tickets walked out the door. It would be trivially easy for the DTA layabouts to grab a handful of cards out of open stock and tranform them into cash, which is the same as money, as Yogi would say. One thousand cards times 10 months is like l0 Million bucks.
Carr: Next scandal: Platinum EBT cards
Thursday, May 30, 2013 By: Howie Carr
The next welfare scandal is going to be the huge balances on some of these EBT cards.
Wait until the Department of Terrorist Assistance (DTA) finally coughs up how much money is on these cards. And yes, Gov. Deval Patrick, this is another one of those “anecdotes.”
Last January a radio listener from Pittsfield sent me a receipt from a local convenience store. Some loafer had run up a tab of $3.28, so he whipped out an EBT card to pay for it. After paying his three bucks, he had $7,066.58 left on the card.
I kid you not. Over seven grand on an EBT card.
There aren’t too many ways to run up seven grand plus on your EBT card. Of course it’s easy if you never use the card while every month you’re getting a new direct deposit of taxpayer cash.
But the only ways not to spend down the balance are because 1) you don’t need an EBT card at all or 2) you have more than one EBT card.
It’s got to be one or the other, right?
A month or so after getting the receipt, I gave it to state Rep. Shauna O’Connell (R-Taunton). She’s served on some of these commissions investigating the fiasco that is Deval Patrick’s DTA, so I figured maybe she could get an answer.
The Herald, meanwhile, filed a FOIA for the top 100 EBT card balances. The DTA said it would cost $500 to research its records.
O’Connell asked the DTA for an accounting of the top EBT card balances. This was sometime last winter. When the phone didn’t ring, she knew it was the DTA.
The keeper of public records in the commonwealth is the secretary of state, Bill Galvin, a Democrat. So O’Connell called Galvin’s office and asked them to intervene. But the DTA apparently doesn’t answer to anyone, Democrat or Republican.
“They don’t discriminate on stonewalling,” said O’Connell. “That’s one thing you have to give them.”
At the end of Auditor Suzanne Bump’s scorching report on EBT fraud this week, she asked the DTA for an accounting of last year’s “missing” 47,000 recipients — a scandal that came to light after a Herald front-page story.
The DTA had conducted what amounted to a Democrat voter-registration drive among layabouts, by sending out a first-class mailing to all 480,000 of the state’s EBT card holders.
Just under 10 percent of the letters came back as undeliverable. Either because 1) they no longer lived at their previous addresses or 2) they never existed to begin with, except for the purposes of committing welfare fraud.
It’s got to be one or the other, right? Deval Patrick dismissed it as mere “leakage.” The DTA told Bump to take a hike.
The DTA called Secretary Galvin’s office the other day and told them that O’Connell should be hearing something by yesterday. Well, today is Thursday, and guess what?
When the phone doesn’t ring, Shauna, you’ll know it’s the DTA.
Carr: Cash-for-clunkers plan stalls out for ex-rep
Friday, May 31, 2013 By: Howie Carr
You know the age-old question: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”
Well, here’s a new twist on it: “Would you buy a used car from this ex-state rep?”
If the ex-state rep is named Chris Asselin, the answer is no, you wouldn’t, and you can’t, at least not in his hometown, because the Springfield License Commission last week found him “unsuitable” to be a used-car dealer.
He had the moral fiber to be a state rep, but not to be a used-car salesman. Fill in your own joke here.
Asselin has a Bureau of Prisons number: 90812-038. He did a bit in Club Fed after pleading guilty to bribery, theft and fraud conspiracy. He was a made member of the Asselin Crime Family, and I do mean family. Asselin, his parents, four siblings, wife and sister-in-law were all indicted in 2004 by the feds for looting the Springfield Housing Authority while Raymond Sr. — “the Man” — was running it.
Six family members were arrested one morning in 2004 after they were awakened in their $3.2 million vacation mansion in Chatham. They later had to forfeit Casa Asselin as part of a $4.4 million settlement with the feds. Did I mention the Asselins are Democrats?
The matriarch of the gang — Janet Asselin — told them as they walked into court that day, “Keep your heads up. You’re Asselins.”
In other words, you’re a bunch of sneak thieves who robbed millions from some of the poorest people in one of the state’s poorest cities.
One of the many Asselin scams was stealing the quarters out of the laundromats in the city’s senior housing projects. The Asselins were grabbing so many quarters that they finally had to buy a quarter-counting machine.
Naturally, they charged the counting machine to the taxpayers.
When the ex-solon/ex-con Asselin went up for his used-car license, it was pointed out to the License Commission that he had paid $140,000 in restitution.
Someone on the Springfield Republican newspaper message board asked a great question: “I wonder if he paid it with 560,000 quarters from those washing machines.”
At age 44, Asselin can’t seem to stay away from the rackets, I mean politics. After being voted out after his indictment, he started a lobbying firm, believe it or not. When he got out of jail, he immediately announced his candidacy for his old seat.
His successor, Sean Curran, commented: “I wasn’t aware he was out of prison.”
Chris Asselin did not return a call seeking comment.
I’ll leave it to yet another newspaper poster to sum it up: “State rep to jail to used-car salesman. I thought it usually went the other way.”
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