Energy Information Administration data shows HOW BIG OIL is ABUSING CONSUMERS.

The
EXCLUSIVE REASON
WHY GAS PRICES ARE HIGH
is because
OIL COMPANIES HAVE CLOSED REFINERIES
&
REDUCED REFINERY INPUTS.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s website (https://www.eia.gov/) has a page dedicated to “Refinery Utilization and Capacity” (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_unc_dcu_nus_a.htm) which shows that, NOT ONLY have BIG OIL companies CLOSED REFINERIES, they have also DECREASED OIL PRODUCTION (Gross Inputs to Refineries) — BOTH which have contributed EXCLUSIVELY to hyper-inflated gas prices, and bank-busting profits for BIG OIL & their stockholders.

In other words, they’ve also “capped oil wells.”

One way to INCREASE PROFITS is to PRICE GOUGE, another is to MANIPULATE THE MARKET.

BIG OIL companies are doing BOTH.

Refineries — which are owned by oil companies — have been CLOSED BY THE OIL COMPANIES, despite making bank-busting RECORD PROFITS.

Gaetz Of Hell: Joel Greenberg Cops Pleas To 6 Federal Felonies, Child Sex Trafficking, Identity Theft, Wire Fraud, Conspiracy, Etc.

No ham sandwich needed.

Solomon “Sol” Wachtler (b.1930), the former Republican Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, coined the phrase “indict a ham sandwich” in a January 1985 interview with Marcia Kramer and Frank Lombardi of the New York Daily News.

In part, the article read that:

“In a bid to make prosecutors more accountable for their actions, Chief Judge Sol Wachtler has proposed that the state scrap the grand jury system of bringing criminal indictments.

“Wachtler, who became the state’s top judge earlier this month, said district attorneys now have so much influence on grand juries that “by and large” they could get them to “indict a ham sandwich.”

A month later, the New York Times noted that Judge Wachtler believed that Grand Juries “operate more often as the prosecutor’s pawn than the citizen’s shield.”

That belief – that Prosecutors can get Grand Juries to do whatever they want them to do – may sound familiar to anyone who has read, or heard, news items of the criticisms of almost any Grand Jury in the United States.

But, of course, the adage doesn’t always true.

At least not in this instance, when the Feds have the goods on their will-plead-guilty-Monday-morning 17 May 2021 suspect – such as DNA and fingerprints – and as an unexpected by-product of the investigation are – more than likely –  working on another very closely-related suspect, who – as of yet – remains unnamed, and unindicted.

That as-yet unnamed, and unindicted suspect would be Florida’s Republican Representative for the 1st Congressional District, Matt Gaetz.

Gatez and Greenberg are each quintessential examples of a Florida Manchild. They’re each multi-millionaires from daddy’s money – Greenberg from his father’s dental clinics, and Gaetz from his father’s pharmaceutical interests – and are, as such, spoiled brats and children of privilege who think the world is their oyster.

---

One “Florida Man” in the headline, of course, is Joel Greenberg, who was formerly a Tax Collector for Seminole County, Florida, and a very good buddy to the other Florida Man, the Banana Republican Florida Representative Matt Gaetz of the state’s 1st Congressional District in Fort Walton.

After his election to public office, Greenberg immediately began ingratiating himself to Trump supporters, and spoke at a rally in Sanford, FL in late 2016. Investigative reporting by the New York Times found that Greenberg and Gaetz had initially met one another through their support of Trump some time in 2017 and in June that year, Gaetz suggested to Greenberg that he consider campaigning for U.S. Congress. And on July 8 that year, Greenberg posted on Twitter a picture himself, along with convicted Federal felon, Nixon aficionado and political dirty-trickster Roger Stone, and Gaetz.

In this September 30, 2019, file photo, Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg talks to the Orlando Sentinel during an interview at his office in Lake Mary, Florida. As a key figure in the federal investigation of Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, Greenberg is expected to plead guilty to criminal charges next week. Joel Greenberg will appear Monday, 17 May 2021 in Federal court in Orlando, Florida for a change of plea hearing, according to court documents. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel via AP, File)

Investigation into Greenberg’s dealings was first initiated by the Secret Service, in response to complaints that he improperly used county resources to mine Bitcoin… after cryptocurrency mining computers he’d purchased with taxpayer dollars for his private personal use caused an electrical system overload, resulting in a fire, which altogether caused over $7000 worth of uninsured damage to Seminole County property.

When the Feds wrapped up their investigation into Greenberg and his activities, they had leveled a 33 count indictment of violating several Federal laws – on charges ranging from stalking to sex trafficking, and conspiracy to fraud – so a plea deal down to 6 is a significant reduction – a very nearly 82% reduction.

David Weinstein, a former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida said of Greenberg’s plea deal that, “His cooperation requires him to be providing truthful testimony and to provide it at the government’s request.”

As part of his plea agreement, on Monday, 17 May 2021 in Orlando at the George C. Young Federal Annex Courthouse in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Joel Greenberg will admit to recruiting women for commercial sexual exploitation, paying them over $70K from 2016 to 2018, including at least one underage girl then-aged 17, whom he paid to have sex with him, and with others, including Matt Gaetz.

Greenberg’s Plea Agreement, which he signed, and was filed Friday, 14 May 2021, states that he will plead guilty to:

Count One: Sex Trafficking of a Child – 18 USC § 1591
Count Eight: Producing a False ID – 18 US § 1028(a)(1)
Count Nine: Aggravated Identity Theft – 18 USA § 1028A
Count Fourteen: Wire Fraud – 18 USC § 1343
Count Twenty-Four: Stalking – 18 USC § 2261A
County Twenty-Six: Conspiracy – 18 USC § 371

Minimum & Maximum Penalties

Count One: Mandatory Minimum 10 years, up to life, $250,000 fine, supervised release not less than 5 years up to life, special assessment $100

Count Eight: Maximum sentence 15 years, $250,000 fine, 3 years supervised release, special assessment $100

Count Nine: Mandatory Minimum 2 years (consecutive to any other conviction), $250,000 fine, 1 year supervised release, special assessment $100

Count Fourteen: Maximum 20 years, $250,000 fine or 2x gross loss caused by offense – whichever is greater, 3 years supervised release, special assessment $100

Count Twenty-Four: 5 years maximum $250,000 fine, 3 years supervised release, special assessment $100

Count Twenty-Six: Maximum 15 years, $250,000 fine or twice gross gain or loss caused by offense – whichever is greater, 3 years supervised release, special assessment $100 – because offense was committed while on pre-trial release, and was warned about it

Federal prosecutors say that Greenberg abused his public office as Tax Collector for Seminole County, Florida not only by embezzling $400,000, but also by improperly using a statewide driver license database to “investigate” information about sexual partners, including a then-17-year old girl with whom he, and others had paid to have sex with.

He was also charged with numerous violations of the Federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, on multiple counts of producing a fraudulent identification document and creating false identification documents, along with aggravated identity theft.

Specifically, Greenberg also abused his elected office by using “his access to the Seminole County Tax Collector’s Office to take surrendered driver licenses before they were shredded,” and then he “used the surrendered driver licenses that he had taken to cause fake driver licenses to be produced that had his photograph but the personal information of the victims whose driver licenses he had taken.”

Prosecutors also say that Greenberg’s corrupt house of cards began to crumble with a series of falsified letters which Greenberg had crafted and mailed [fraudulent use of U.S. Mail] which purported to be from a non-existent “very concerned student” enrolled at a private prep school where Brian Beute – a Republican candidate for Tax Collector and political opponent – taught music, and falsely alleged that the music teacher (Greenberg’s political opponent) had engaged in sexual misconduct with another student.

As part of that Roger-Stone-initiated ruse, he also created fake social media accounts in order to pose as Beute, or others, in an attempt to discredit him.

But his problems began in earnest last summer when he was arrested on charges of stalking his political opponent.

Republicans excel, are expert in, and frequent users of, the tactic of psychological projection – falsely claiming that an opponent is engaging in the very activities which they (the accuser) are/have engaged in.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg III testified in court that investigators found Greenberg’s fingerprints and DNA on the letters, and traced the fake social media accounts to his computer’s IP address.

Prosecutors say that Greenberg initially met the under-age girl through

Child Abuse & Neglect Cost Alabama $3.7B in 2018

Direct economic losses attributable to child abuse and neglect cost the State of Alabama $3.7 billion in 2018, according to a study conducted by The University of Alabama College of Human Environmental Sciences and The University of Alabama Center for Business and Economic Research.

Researchers found that “the tangible cost of child maltreatment (or child abuse and neglect) to the Alabama economy in 2018 is conservatively estimated to be $3.7 billion.”

The report entitled “The Cost of Child Maltreatment to the Alabama Economy” found that figure is the direct cost which the state bears if only the child victims are considered, and does not include associated costs to families (including extended ones) and communities that are known to occur.

The research which was conducted in collaboration with the Alabama Department of Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention and The Children’s Trust Fund, found that cost of lost worker productivity of victims was the single greatest financial cost – $2,629,685,802, while costs to the state child welfare system exceed $281,886,848, and Adult Criminality costs were conservatively found to be $109,469,664.

Child maltreatment causes preventable infant mortality and low birthweight, chronic health and mental health problems, developmental and educational delays, lower work productivity, and higher involvement with the criminal justice system.

The cost to the state is

Impeachment v2.0 Day 3: The Devil Made Me Do It

“Trump told us to do it.”

Trump’s MAGA supporters rioter-insurrectionists who were assembled at the White House Ellipse Park January 6, 2021 quickly became violent exclusively because they believed that Trump was asking them to do so – that they were doing his bidding.

“He said, ‘Be there.’ So I went and I answered the call of my president.”

House Impeachment Managers cited social media posts, recorded video, and court documents which reflected as much.

“I Answered the Call of My President.”

Impeachment Managers also extensively documented that several months BEFORE the election, Trump was laying the groundwork for convincing his cult of followers that the November presidential election was fixed, and that his victory was stolen because of

STOP THE ABUSE: Prime Examples Why ALL Churches & Religion Should Be TAXED

The Associated Press has reported today that Catholic parishes in dioceses throughout the nation have fallen at the feet of government for a pandemic bailout – all while sitting on massive piles of cash that GREW SIGNIFICANTLY during the pandemic – and without any government help.

(see: Sitting On Billions, Catholic Dioceses Amassed Taxpayer Aid)

That is at least TWO forms of fraudulent abuse of government:
1.) Asking for help when it’s NOT needed, and;
2.) Religion asking Government for help.

That the government has become involved in the promotion and promulgation of religion is a stench in the nostrils of our nation’s Founders, is a violation of our United States Constitution’s “Establishment clause” in the First Amendment, and a perverted corruption of Heaven – for those who believe religion is above the political fray.

For those who adhere to the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson had some STRONG words to the Danbury Baptists who sought assistance from him, shortly after he had become President in 1801. It was on January 1 the following year, that Jefferson replied to a letter sent to him by the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut.

While much is rightfully made of Jefferson’s reply, not much is ever said about what the Baptists had written to him. In a letter dated “[after 7 Oct. 1801],” the Danbury Baptist Association had composed a letter to Jefferson of much greater length than was Jefferson’s brief reply to them – 503 words versus 226 words.

Jefferson was newly President, having been inaugurated as the 3rd President, March 4, 1801, and served two consecutive terms – until March 3, 1809. A mere 7 months into his first term, the Danbury Baptist Association wrote to him, in part, that;

“… religion is consider’d as the first object of Legislation; & therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights: and these favors we receive at the expence of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistant with the rights of freemen. It is not to be wondred at therefore; if those, who seek after power & gain under the pretence of goverment & Religion should reproach their fellow men—should reproach their chief Magistrate, as an enemy of religion Law & good order because he will not, dares not assume the prerogative of Jehovah and make Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ.

Sir, we are sensible that the President of the united States, is not the national Legislator, & also sensible that the national goverment cannot destroy the Laws of each State; but our hopes are strong that the sentiments of our beloved President, which have had such genial Effect already, like the radiant beams of the Sun, will shine & prevail through all these States and all the world till Hierarchy and tyranny be destroyed from the Earth. …”

The style and use of language then, of course, is significantly different from style today, and is much more “flowery,” formal and ornamental. Today’s language is more straight-forward, and to-the-point… blunt, even. There are advantages and disadvantages to each style, of course, but the point is, for that reason, sometimes it can be difficult to “interpret” what the writer(s) are attempting to say, or what matter they’re trying to address. That can also be complicated by variants in spelling of words commonly used today, which are considered obsolete, and archaic. One such example or archaic spelling in their letter is the word “ancient” which they spell as “antient.”

But the the excerpts in the paragraphs above are the veritable “heart” of the matter in their letter. In essence, what the Danbury Baptist Association is asking Jefferson to do, is to “settle” a matter – in their favor – in a disagreement they had with a dissenting religious faction.

A bit of background knowledge is necessary for a more full understanding the matter which the Danbury Baptists’ letter addressed. The National Archives provides an excellently succinct backgrounder for the matter, as follows:

“At its October 1800 meeting, the association initiated a petition movement to redress the grievances of the dissenting minority against the Congregationalist majority in the region. Although disestablishment had not been an issue in the 1800 election in Connecticut, the movement was a call for the statewide repeal of all laws that could be understood as supporting an established religion. [Emphasis added. Ed.] In 1801, the petition movement tried to remain above partisan politics and cultivated support of some Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and other dissenters who might be sympathetic to their cause. On 8 Oct. 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association, meeting at Colebrook, Connecticut, voted that Elders Stephen Royce (of Stratfield), Daniel Wildman (of Wolcott and Bristol), Nehemiah Dodge (of Southington and Farmington), Stephen S. Nelson (of Hartford), and Deacons Jared Mills (of Simsbury) and Ephraim Robbins (of Hartford) “be a committee to prepare an address to the President of the United States, in behalf of this association.” The address and President Jefferson’s reply of 1 Jan. 1802 were reprinted in newspapers across the country, including Denniston and Cheetham’s American Citizen on 18 Jan. 1802 (Minutes of the Danbury Baptist Association, Holden at Colebrook, October 7 and 8, 1801; Together with Their Circular and Corresponding Letters [Hartford, 1801]; Shaw-Shoemaker, No. 109; McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 2:920, 985–8, 1004–5; Connecticut Courant, 25 May 1801).”

The letter by the Danbury Baptist Association dated October 7, 1801 was received by Jefferson on 30 December 1801, and is enumerated in Jefferson’s “Summary Journal of Letters.”

In essence, the Danbury Baptists were asking Jefferson to
rule in a semi-private matter
(a disagreement between Danbury Baptists,
and a differing Christian sect),
in which any hint of religion was going to be
eradicated from
the laws in Connecticut.
The Danbury Baptists opposed the measure.

Thus, it can easier be understood Jefferson’s reply to them. And while Jefferson’s letter is half the length of the one addressed to him by Danbury Baptists, it is much more succinct. In essence, Jefferson “shut them down” (at least quieted their clamor) by his reply, which in pertinent part read:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

“A wall of separation between Church and State.” There could perhaps be no more clear example for a case of “laissez-faire” than in Jefferon’s letter of reply to the Danbury Baptists.

And now, we have a multi-billion dollar, tax-free corporation coming and begging for a taxpayer-funded handout.

Could there be anything more onerous?

Could there be any greater example of an violation of the First Amendment’s “Establishment clause” – that government should not endorse any religion, nor show deference to any religion by providing special support and succor to that religion?

No.

When the Catholic church – or any religion – lobbies the government for special consideration and gets $1.4 BILLION in taxpayer-funded handouts, what is there to be said?

You read that correctly.

On July 10, 2020, in a story headlined “AP: Catholic Church Lobbied For Taxpayer Funds, Got $1.4B,” the Associated Press reported that;

“The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

“The church’s haul may have reached — or even exceeded — $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the U.S. government’s pandemic relief efforts, an Associated Press analysis of federal data released this week found.”

How about THEM apples, eh?

Sexual predators in the Catholic church, most often as clergy who were long known to be habitually chronic sexual predators, were found out, and rather than ‘fessing up, apologizing, and offering some kind of universal class-action settlement with all affected individuals, and forever closing out their case, the Catholic church deliberately shuffled money around to hide it from any prospective legal action, and applied for, and was granted, special protection under bankruptcy laws to stash their cash away from the victims, and their lawyers, who were preparing to, or were already suing the church for allowing their sexual abuse to continue, in some cases, for well over 40, or 50 years, or even longer.

If that is not the picture of corruption, I do not know what it.

And to think… the QAnon folks ~could~ have sunk their teeth into that meat, but instead chose not to, and rather, fabricated some far-fetched bullshit story that has so little substance, that it’s laughable. And right-wingers believed them!

THERE IS MORE GLOBAL CHILD SEXUAL ABUSES RIGHT UNDER THEIR NOSES THAN THEY COULD EVER SHAKE STICK AT – INCLUDING ACCOMPANYING CRIMES AND CORRUPTION – AND QANON TYPES DELIBERATELY CHOSE TO IGNORE IT.

And, I can guarant-damn-tee it, that they’ll DO NOTHING ABOUT IT.

The United States Congress should pull the rug out from under the Catholic church’s feet – along with ALL other luxuriating religious criminal cabals – and:
1.) PERMANENTLY REVOKE ALL religious organizations’ tax-exempt status;
2.) MANDATE that they ALL pay taxes;
3.) ELIMINATE laws providing special treatment to ALL religious entities, including tax status, by changing tax code to reflect status change.

If churches and other religious organizations want taxpayer money, they ought to pay for it through taxes. That way as well, ALL churches would be free to their heart’s content to preach from the pulpit any kind of political tripe that they see fit, and not have to worry about losing their tax-free status… because it’d already be gone.

It is
LONG OVERDUE
for this
Government-supported
Criminal Clown Theater
TO STOP!

And the ONLY way to put an end to religious corruption and governmental support of religious corruption, is to REMOVE TAX FREE STATUS FOR RELIGION.

There is NOTHING in the Constitution that states, nor suggests, that religion should be tax-free.

NOTHING!

James A. Garfield, a Republican, who later became President, had something to say about the matter. And, at the time when he made the following remarks – Monday, June 22, 1874 – was a Member of Congress in the House of Representatives from Ohio’s 19th Congressional District.

Mr. GARFIELD. I desire in a very few words, not to argue the merits of this case but to give the ground on which the Committee on Appropriations made their recommendation. Having stated that ground, I shall leave the question to the discretion of the House.

James Abram Garfield (November 19, 1831–September 19, 1881) was a Republican, and 20th President of the United States from March 4, 1881 until his assassination September 19, 1881. Before being elected POTUS, he was Member of Ohio State Senate, 1859-61; Member of U.S. House of Representatives, 1863-80, and; Elected to United States Senate, 1880. He was a member of the Disciples of Christ denomination, graduated college Phi Beta Kappa salutatorian from Williams College where he first worked as janitor, later becoming a teacher there, United States Army Veteran of the Civil War rising to the rank of Brigadier General, teacher, lawyer, and public official.

I agree with everything that the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. E. R. Hoar] has said about the worthy charitable work of this organization known as the Little Sisters of the Poor. I agree that they distribute their charity without the slightest regard to denominational belief. The only ground on which I make a distinction (and it is a distinction I wish the House to understand) is this: Here is an organization composed exclusively of people of one religious denomination. Under its charter the members are wholly and only of one religious sect, and of one society within that religious sect. I take it that no woman in America, not a Catholic, could be one of the corporators in this home. At any rate I take it for granted that the members would not act in conjunction with any corporation not of that sect as a joint controller of the institution.

Now, I make the point – and the Committee on Appropriations made the point – that we ought never to commit ourselves to the aid of an exclusively sectarian institution. I would say the same were this institution under the control of a Protestant church, even if it were a church to which I myself belonged. The divorce between the church and the state ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no church property anywhere in any State or in the nation should be exempted from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a church tax upon the whole community. [emphasis added]

If the House deems this a point that ought not to be considered, I shall be very glad to see these Little Sisters of the Poor helped. If the fifty-sixth amendment, making an appropriation for the work for the Women’s Christian Association were in favor of any one sect, I should vote very quickly to strike it out.”

–– James A. Garfield, Republican, then Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio’s 19th Congressional District, Congressional Record, 43rd Congress, Monday, June 22, 1874, Volume 2, Part 6, p5384

The United States Federal Government has also FAILED The People by FAILING to initiate a RICO case against the Roman Catholic Church. RICO is Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization, and if any organization was ever corrupt, it is the Roman Catholic Church, for their DELIBERATE NEGLECT of known child sexual predators in their ranks, predominately in the clergy.

TAX ALL CHURCHES!

When the coronavirus forced churches to close their doors and give up Sunday collections, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte turned to the federal government’s signature small business relief program for more than $8 million.

The diocese’s headquarters, churches and schools landed the help even though they had roughly $100 million of their own cash and short-term investments available last spring, financial records show. When the cash catastrophe church leaders feared didn’t materialize, those assets topped $110 million by the summer.

As the pandemic began to unfold, scores of Catholic dioceses across the U.S. received aid through the Paycheck Protection Program while sitting on well over $10 billion in cash, short-term investments or other available funds, an Associated Press investigation has found. And despite the broad economic downturn, these assets have grown in many dioceses.

Yet even with that financial safety net, the 112 dioceses that shared their financial statements, along with the churches and schools they oversee, collected at least $1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed aid. A majority of these dioceses reported enough money on hand to cover at least six months of operating expenses, even without any new income.

The financial resources of several dioceses rivaled or exceeded those available to publicly traded companies like Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, whose early participation in the program triggered outrage. Federal officials responded by emphasizing the money was intended for those who lacked the cushion that cash and other liquidity provide. Many corporations returned the funds.

Overall, the nation’s nearly 200 dioceses, where bishops and cardinals govern, and other Catholic institutions received at least $3 billion. That makes the Roman Catholic Church perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the paycheck program, according to AP’s analysis of data the U.S. Small Business Administration released following a public-records lawsuit by news organizations. The agency for months had shared only partial information, making a more precise analysis impossible.

Already one of the largest federal aid efforts ever, the SBA reopened the Paycheck Protection Program last month with a new infusion of nearly $300 billion. In making the announcement, the agency’s administrator at the time, Jovita Carranza, hailed the program for serving “as an economic lifeline to millions of small businesses.”

Church officials have said their employees were as worthy of help as workers at Main Street businesses, and that without it they would have had to slash jobs and curtail their charitable mission as demand for food pantries and social services spiked. They point out the program’s rules didn’t require them to exhaust their stores of cash and other funds before applying.

But new financial statements several dozen dioceses have posted for 2020 show that their available resources remained robust or improved during the pandemic’s hard, early months. The pattern held whether a diocese was big or small, urban or rural, East or West, North or South.

In Kentucky, funds available to the Archdiocese of Louisville, its parishes and other organizations grew from at least $153 million to $157 million during the fiscal year that ended in June, AP found. Those same offices and organizations received at least $17 million in paycheck money. “The Archdiocese’s operations have not been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak,” according to its financial statement. [emphasis added]

In Illinois, the Archdiocese of Chicago had more than $1 billion in cash and investments in its headquarters and cemetery division as of May, while the faithful continued to donate “more than expected,” according to a review by the independent ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service. Chicago’s parishes, schools and ministries accumulated at least $77 million in paycheck protection funds.

Up the interstate from Charlotte in North Carolina, the Raleigh Diocese collected at least $11 million in aid. Yet during the fiscal year that ended in June, overall offerings were down just 5% and the assets available to the diocese, its parishes and schools increased by about $21 million to more than $170 million, AP found. In another measure of fiscal health, the diocese didn’t make an emergency draw on its $10 million line of credit.

Catholic leaders in dioceses including Charlotte, Chicago, Louisville and Raleigh said their parishes and schools, like many other businesses and nonprofits, suffered financially when they closed to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Some dioceses reported that their hardest-hit churches saw income drop by 40% or more before donations began to rebound months later, and schools took hits when fundraisers were canceled and families had trouble paying tuition. As revenues fell, dioceses said, wage cuts and a few dozen layoffs were necessary in some offices.

Catholic researchers at Georgetown University who surveyed the nation’s bishops last summer found such measures weren’t frequent. In comparison, a survey by the investment bank Goldman Sachs found 42% of small business owners had cut staff or salaries, and that 33% had spent their personal savings to stay open.

Church leaders have questioned why AP focused on their faith following a story last July, when New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote that reporters “invented a story when none existed and sought to bash the Church.”

By using a special exemption that the church lobbied to include in the paycheck program, Catholic entities amassed at least $3 billion — roughly the same as the combined total of recipients from the other faiths that rounded out the top five, AP found. Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Jewish faith-based recipients also totaled at least $3 billion. Catholics account for about a fifth of the U.S. religious population while members of Protestant and Jewish denominations are nearly half, according to the Pew Research Center.

Catholic institutions also received many times more than other major nonprofits with charitable missions and national reach, such as the United Way, Goodwill Industries and Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Overall, Catholic recipients got roughly twice as much as 40 of the largest, most well-known charities in America combined, AP found.

The complete picture is certainly even more lopsided. So many Catholic entities received help that reporters could not identify them all, even after spending hundreds of hours hand-checking tens of thousands of records in federal data.

The Vatican referred questions about the paycheck program to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said it does not speak on behalf of dioceses.

Presented with AP’s findings, bishops conference spokeswoman Chieko Noguchi responded with a broad statement that the Paycheck Protection Program was “designed to protect the jobs of Americans from all walks of life, regardless of whether they work for for-profit or nonprofit employers, faith-based or secular.”

INTERNAL SKEPTICISM

The AP’s assessment of church finances is among the most comprehensive to date. It draws largely from audited financial statements posted online by the central offices of 112 of the country’s nearly 200 dioceses.

The church isn’t required to share its financials. As a result, the analysis doesn’t include cash, short-term assets and lines of credit held by some of the largest dioceses, including those serving New York City and other major metropolitan areas.

The analysis focused on available assets because federal officials cited those metrics when clarifying eligibility for the paycheck program. Therefore, the $10 billion AP identified doesn’t count important financial pillars of the U.S. church. Among those are its thousands of real estate properties and most of the funds that parishes and schools hold. Also excluded is the money — estimated at $9.5 billion in a 2019 study by the Delaware-based wealth management firm Wilmington Trust — held by charitable foundations created to help dioceses oversee donations.

In addition, dioceses can rely on a well-funded support system that includes help from wealthier dioceses, the bishops conference and other Catholic organizations. Canon law, the legal code the Vatican uses to govern the global church, notes that richer dioceses may assist poorer ones, and the AP found instances where they did.

In their financial statements, the 112 dioceses acknowledged having at least $4.5 billion in liquid or otherwise available assets. To reach its $10 billion total, AP also included funding that dioceses had opted to designate for special projects instead of general expenses; excess cash that parishes and their affiliates deposit with their diocese’s savings and loan; and lines of credit dioceses typically have with outside banks.

Some church officials said AP was misreading their financial books and therefore overstating available assets. They insisted that money their bishop or his advisers had set aside for special projects couldn’t be repurposed during an emergency, although financial statements posted by multiple dioceses stated the opposite.

For its analysis, AP consulted experts in church finance and church law. One was the Rev. James Connell, an accountant for 15 years before joining the priesthood and becoming an administrator in the Milwaukee Archdiocese. Connell, also a canon lawyer who is now retired from his position with the archdiocese, said AP’s findings convinced him that Catholic entities did not need government aid — especially when thousands of small businesses were permanently closing.

“Was it want or need?” Connell asked. “Need must be present, not simply the want. Justice and love of neighbor must include the common good.”

Connell was not alone among the faithful concerned by the church’s pursuit of taxpayer money. Parishioners in several cities have questioned church leaders who received government money for Catholic schools they then closed.

Elsewhere, a pastor in a Western state told AP that he refused to apply even after diocesan officials repeatedly pressed him. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of his diocese’s policy against talking to reporters and concerns about possible retaliation.

The pastor had been saving, much like leaders of other parishes. When the pandemic hit, he used that money, trimmed expenses and told his diocese’s central finance office that he had no plans to seek the aid. Administrators followed up several times, the pastor said, with one high-ranking official questioning why he was “leaving free money on the table.”

The pastor said he felt a “sound moral conviction” that the money was meant more for shops and restaurants that, without it, might close forever.

As the weeks passed last spring, the pastor said his church managed just fine. Parishioners were so happy with new online Masses and his other outreach initiatives, he said, they boosted their contributions beyond 2019 levels.

“We didn’t need it,” the pastor said, “and intentionally wanted to leave the money for those small business owners who did.”

WEATHERING A DOWNTURN

Months after the pandemic first walloped the economy, the 112 dioceses that release financial statements began sharing updates. Among the 47 dioceses that have thus far, the pandemic’s impact was far from crippling.

The 47 dioceses that have posted financials for the fiscal year that ended in June had a median 6% increase in the amount of cash, short-term investments and other funds that they and their affiliates could use for unanticipated or general expenses, AP found. In all, 38 dioceses grew those resources, while nine reported declines.

Finances in Raleigh and 10 other dioceses that took government assistance were stable enough that they did not have to dip into millions they had available through outside lines of credit.

“This crisis has tested us,” Russell Elmayan, Raleigh’s chief financial officer, told the diocese’s magazine website in July, “but we are hopeful that the business acumen of our staff and lay counselors, together with the strategic financial reserves built over time, will help our parishes and schools continue to weather this unprecedented event.” Raleigh officials did not answer direct questions from AP.

The 47 dioceses acknowledged a smaller amount of readily available assets than AP counted, though by their own accounting that grew as well.

The improving financial outlook is due primarily to parishioners who found ways to continue donating and U.S. stock markets that were rebounding to new highs. But when the markets were first plunging, officials in several dioceses said, they had to stretch available assets because few experts were forecasting a rapid recovery.

In Louisville, Charlotte and other dioceses, church leaders said they offered loans or grants to needy parishes and schools, or offset the monthly charges they assess their parishes. In Raleigh, for example, the headquarters used $3 million it had set aside for liability insurance and also tapped its internal deposit and loan fund.

Church officials added that the pandemic’s full toll will probably be seen in a year or two, because some key sources of revenue are calculated based on income that parishes and schools generate.

“We believe that we will not know all of the long-term negative impacts on parish, school and archdiocesan finances for some time,” Louisville Archdiocese spokeswoman Cecelia Price wrote in response to questions.

At the nine dioceses that recorded declines in liquid or other short-term assets, the drops typically were less than 10%, and not always clearly tied to the pandemic.

The financial wherewithal of some larger dioceses is underscored by the fact that, like publicly traded companies, they can raise capital by selling bonds to investors.

One was Chicago, where analysts with the Moody’s ratings agency calculated that the $1 billion in cash and investments held by the archdiocese headquarters and cemeteries division could cover about 631 days of operating expenses.

Church officials in Chicago asserted that those dollars were needed to cover substantial expenses while parishioner donations slumped. Without paycheck support, “parishes and schools would have been forced to cut many jobs, as the archdiocese, given its liabilities, could not have closed such a funding gap,” spokeswoman Paula Waters wrote.

Moody’s noted in its May report that while giving was down, federal aid had compensated for that and helped leave the archdiocese “well positioned to weather this revenue loss over the next several months.” Among the reasons for the optimism: “a unique credit strength” that under church law allows the archbishop to tax parish revenue virtually at will.

In a separate Moody’s report on New Orleans, which filed for bankruptcy in May while facing multiple clergy abuse lawsuits, the ratings agency wrote in July that the archdiocese did so while having “significant financial reserves, with spendable cash and investments of over $160 million.”

Moody’s said the archdiocese’s “very good” liquid assets would let it operate 336 days without additional income. Those assets prompted clergy abuse victims to ask a federal judge to dismiss the bankruptcy filing, arguing the archdiocese’s primary reason for seeking the legal protection was to minimize payouts to them.

The archdiocese, along with its parishes and schools, collected more than $26 million in paycheck money. New Orleans Archdiocesan officials didn’t respond to written questions.

PURSUING AID

Without special treatment, the Catholic Church would not have received nearly so much under the Paycheck Protection Program.

After Congress let nonprofits and religious organizations participate in the first place, Catholic officials lobbied the Trump Administration for a second break. Religious organizations were freed from the so-called affiliation rule that typically disqualifies applicants with more than 500 workers.

Without that break, many dioceses would have missed out because — between their head offices, parishes, schools and other affiliates — their employee count would exceed the limit.

Among those lobbying, federal records show, was the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Parishes, schools and ministries there collected at least $80 million in paycheck aid, at a time when the headquarters reported $658 million in available funds heading into the fiscal year when the coronavirus arrived.

Catholic officials in the U.S. needed the special exception for at least two reasons.

Church law says dioceses, parishes and schools are affiliated, something the Los Angeles Archdiocese acknowledged “proved to be an obstacle” to receiving funds because its parishes operate “under the authority of the diocesan bishop.” Dioceses, parishes, schools and other Catholic entities also routinely assert to the Internal Revenue Service that they are affiliated so they can maintain their federal income tax exemption.

Estimates of the total subsidies enjoyed by religious groups did not take into account the amounts received from subsidies such as the sales tax subsidies, local sales and income tax subsidies, volunteer labor subsidy, and donor-tax exemptions.
Researchers at the Institute claimed that the tax subsidies which were unaccounted for could also amount to billions in tax savings.
Further, the Institute claimed that the subsidies should be cut for religious groups, or at least restricted to being applied solely to the charitable works of the marginalization.
Religious organizations also enjoyed approximately $6.1 billion in state income tax subsidies, along with $1.2 billion of parsonage, and $2.2 billion in the faith-based initiatives subsidy.
Churches in the USA receive approximately $71 billion in tax credits and tax breaks each year, according to the results of new research released on October 16th by the Secular Policy Institute.

While some Catholic officials insisted their affiliates are separate and financially independent, AP found many instances of borrowing and spending among them when dioceses were faced with prior cash crunches. In Philadelphia, for example, the archdiocese received at least $18 million from three affiliates, including a seminary, to fund a compensation program for clergy sex abuse survivors, according to 2019 financial statements.

Cardinals and bishops have broad authority over parishes and the pastors who run them. Church law requires parishes to submit annual financial reports and bishops may require parishes to deposit surplus money with internal banks administered by the diocese.

“The parishioners cannot hire or fire the pastor; that is for the bishop to do,” said Connell, the priest, former accountant and canon lawyer. “Each parish functions as a wholly owned subsidiary or division of a larger corporation, the diocese.”

Bishops acknowledged a concerted effort to tap paycheck funds in a survey by Catholic researchers at Georgetown University. When asked what they had done to address the pandemic’s financial fallout, 95% said their central offices helped parishes apply for paycheck and other aid — the leading response. That topped encouraging parishioners to donate electronically.

After Congress approved the paycheck program, three high-ranking officials in New Hampshire’s Manchester Diocese sent an urgent memo to parishes, schools and affiliated organizations urging them to refrain from layoffs or furloughs until completing their applications. “We are all in this together,” the memo read, adding that diocesan officials were working expeditiously to provide “step by step instructions.”

Paycheck Protection Program funds came through low-interest bank loans, worth up to $10 million each, that the federal government would forgive so long as recipients used the money to cover about two months of wages and operating expenses.

After an initial $659 billion last spring, Congress added another $284 billion in December. With the renewal came new requirements intended to ensure that funds go to businesses that lost money due to the pandemic. Lawmakers also downsized the headcount for applicants to 300 or fewer employees.

A QUESTION OF NEED

In other federal small business loan programs, government help is treated as a last resort.

Applicants must show they couldn’t get credit elsewhere. And those with enough available funds must pay more of their own way to reduce taxpayer subsidies.

Congress didn’t include these tests in the Paycheck Protection Program. To speed approvals, lenders weren’t required to do their usual screening and instead relied on applicants’ self-certifications of need.

The looser standards helped create a run on the first $349 billion in paycheck funding. Small business owners complained that they were shut out, yet dozens of companies healthy enough to be traded on stock exchanges scored quick approval.

As blowback built in April, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned at a news briefing that there would be “severe consequences” for applicants who improperly tapped the program.

“We want to make sure this money is available to small businesses that need it, people who have invested their entire life savings,” Mnuchin said. Program guidelines evolved to stress that participants with access to significant cash probably could not get the assistance “in good faith.”

Mnuchin’s Treasury Department said it would audit loans exceeding $2 million, although federal officials have not said whether they would hold religious organizations and other nonprofits to the same standard of need as businesses.

The headquarters and major departments for more than 40 dioceses received more than $2 million. Every diocese that responded to questions said it would seek to have the government cover the loans, rather than repay the funds.

One diocese receiving a loan over $2 million was Boston. According to the archdiocese’s website, its central ministries office received about $3 million, while its parishes and schools collected about $32 million more.

The archdiocese — along with its parishes, schools and cemeteries — had roughly $200 million in available funds in June 2019, according to its audited financial report. When that fiscal year ended several months into the pandemic, available funds had increased to roughly $233 million.

Nevertheless, spokesman Terrence Donilon cited “ongoing economic pressure” in saying the archdiocese will seek forgiveness for last year’s loans and will apply for additional, new funds during the current round.

Beyond its growing available funds, the archdiocese and its affiliates benefit from other sources of funding. The archdiocese’s “Inspiring Hope” campaign, announced in January, has raised at least $150 million.

And one of its supporting charities — the Catholic Schools Foundation, where Cardinal Sean O’Malley is board chairman — counted more than $33 million in cash and other funds that could be “used for general operations” as of the beginning of the 2020 fiscal year, according to its financial statement.

Despite these resources, the archdiocese closed a half-dozen schools in May and June, often citing revenue losses due to the pandemic. Paycheck protection data show four of those schools collectively were approved for more than $700,000.

The shuttered schools included St. Francis of Assisi in Braintree, a middle-class enclave 10 miles south of Boston, which received $210,000. Parents said they felt blindsided by the closure, announced in June as classes ended.

“It’s like a punch to the gut because that was such a home for so many people for so long,” said Kate Nedelman Herbst, the mother of two children who attended the elementary school.

Along with more than 2,000 other school supporters, Herbst signed a written protest to O’Malley that noted the archdiocese’s robust finances. After O’Malley didn’t reply, parents appealed to the Vatican, this time underscoring the collection of Paycheck Protection Program money.

“It is very hard to reconcile the large sums of money raised by the archdiocese in recent years with this wholesale destruction of the church’s educational infrastructure,” parents wrote.

In December, the Vatican turned down their request to overrule O’Malley. Spokesman Donilon said the decision to close the school “is not being reconsidered.”

Today, the three children of Michael Waterman and his wife, Jeanine, are learning at home. And they still can’t understand why the archdiocese didn’t shift money to help save a school beloved by the faithful.

“What angers us,” Michael Waterman said, “is that we feel like, given the amount of money that the Catholic Church has, they absolutely could have remained open.”

___

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.

Contact the reporters at https://twitter.com/reesedunklin and https://twitter.com/mikerezendes.

___

Contributing to this report were Justin Myers, Randy Herschaft, Rodrique Ngowi, Holbrook Mohr, Jason Dearen and James LaPorta.

https://apnews.com/article/catholic-church-get-aid-investigation-39a404f55c82fea84902cd16f04e37b2

Kelly Loeffler Received Over $3M In Farm Subsidies… And Sits On The Agriculture Committee

Blessed are those who have, for they shall be given more.

That’s not a genuine Bible verse, by the way. And if you’re any kind of decently well-read individual, with more than a perfunctory, or minimal knowledge of the Judeo-Christian collection of holy writings collectively known as the Bible, you would know that already.

And by that same token, of being any kind of decently well-read individual, you would also know that there is an eerie parallel to a saying that Jesus of Nazareth made about a related matter – the Parable of the Talents – as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. A parable, of course, is a moralizing tale, a story meant to illustrate some matter, and to point out a wrong doing, or type of injustice in an unobtrusive, easy-to-understand manner.

We’re going to get to Georgia’s appointed Republican Senator whose net worth of $500M is BY FAR the wealthiest member of Congress in just a moment, but first you need some background for understanding.

Woodcut from Historiae Celebriores Veteris Testamenti Iconibus Representatae — dated to 1712 — depicts the Parable of the Talents as told by Jesus of Nazareth, in Matthew 25:14–30. Two men bring the money that was entrusted to them back to their master, while a third man searches for his money outside.

The story states that, in preparation for a journey of some duration, an owner/master entrusted and distributed his money to his 3 servants. The unspoken hope, or expectation those days, is that, upon his return, they would have increased the portion with which they were entrusted and charged.

To one, he gave he gave 5 talents (a monetary measurement), to another he gave 2, and to the third, he gave 1 talent. Upon his return, the first two who received 5, and 2, respectively, reported that they’d doubled the money. The third did not, and rather, reported that he buried the money in the ground, and had not gained anything. Upon hearing that news, the owner became enraged, called that servant lazy and wicked, fired him, then ordered that single talent to be taken from him and given to the one with 10.

That’s an important point, which you’ll see later, why.

Jesus of Nazareth, who was telling the story, made a moral assessment, and drew a conclusion based upon the actions of that one who did not return a profit, and reportedly said, “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”

While the story is simply told, the meaning behind it is uncertain, though there have been many sermons preached about the tale. And yet, the audience hearing that parable then, in the era in which is was told, would have interpreted it quite differently from today’s audience, according to Dr. Richard L. Rohrbaugh, STD, Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Religious Studies at Lewis and Clark College, whose primary scholarly pursuit was establishing proper historical and cultural contexts for Biblical texts.

Dr. Rohrbaugh said that, in the era in which the story was first told, the audience would have understood that the “profit” was made through the exploitative abuse of others, and that the third servant was the one which would have been considered honorable by the standard of the day. Thus, that interpretation of the parable, would mean that the first two servants were shameful, instead of the third. When asked about the matter, Dr. Rohrbaugh said in part that,

“[G]iven the “limited good” outlook of ancient Mediterranean cultures, seeking “more” was considered morally wrong. Because the pie was “limited” and already all distributed, anyone getting “more” meant someone else got less. Thus, honorable people did not try to get more, and those who did were automatically considered thieves: To have gained, to have accumulated more than one started with, is to have taken the share of someone else.”

As he explained in the Biblical Archaeology Society, “In the ancient world, greedy people who did not want to get accused of profiting at someone else’s expense – which was considered shameful – would delegate their business to slaves, who were held to a different standard.” Dr. Rohrbaugh explained that the reasoning was that, “Shameful, even greedy, behavior could be condoned in slaves because slaves had no honor nor any expectation of it.”

Again, in the parable, the master

Fraud, Waste, and Abuse on Full Display at DeVos’s Department of Education

In the business world, the acronym “OPM” stands for “Other Peoples’ Money.” But at the Federal level of the United States Government, it stands for “Office of Personnel Management.”

Although Amway multi-millionairess Betsy DeVoss is an employee of the United States Government as the Secretary of Education – an ironic, even hypocritical position for her, since she’s never attended, even as much as set foot in, a Public School in her lifetime, even as Secretary – it’s painfully obvious that she continues to operate by the OPM business principle.

She continues to be resoundingly criticized by many, not all of whom are her political compatriots. If there could be said to be a “guiding light” to her first-ever tenure as a public servant in the capacity which she’s occupied for the past 4 years, it’s more for us, less for you. And in this case, the “us” refers to her wealthy pals, and anyone with a harebrained idea parading under the banner of “choice” and “education.”

As an aside, it’s ironic that Banana Republicans oppose choice in so many areas, especially healthcare; they don’t want a Federal Option for health insurance, they don’t want a woman to have autonomy over her own body to choose to carry or not, etc.

But as “choice” pertains to DeVos and Company, it refers to so-called “charter” schools – the educational “Flavor of the Day” among Banana Republicans. Simply put, charter schools are private, often for-profit and Wall Street-traded entities that compete for limited public tax dollars against Public Schools. Think of them as leeches, mosquitos, and other blood-suckers that little-by-little siphon off the lifeblood from the host upon which they feast. Not quite the scenario of pigs at a trough, but very close enough, because if you attempt to get in between them and their food source, they’ll kill you.

Again, choice is good for them, but bad for you.

And that’s but one example where the hypocrisy of the Banana Republican party comes in.

What you would think if I were to tell you that an entity with no experience in education, was denied local approval, applied for, and was granted well over a million tax dollars to open a charter school, but it never opened, and they kept all the money?

Would you be okay with that?

What about this?

From the 2006/7 through the 2013/14 school year, over 537 prospective charter schools that NEVER EDUCATED EVEN ONE STUDENT, NEVER OPENED, yet received well over $45 million tax dollars?

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos speaks October 15, 2020 at Phoenix International Academy in Arizona.

Would you be okay with that?

What about a charter “school” that never opened even for one day in Pennsylvania, yet was granted well over $30 million by Secretary Betsy DeVos?

Would you be cool with that?

It all happened under Betsy DeVos’s oversight.

Enormous fraud, waste, and abuse is being perpetuated before our very eyes, and yet, we’re told bad is good, sweet is sour, abuse is good, taxes are bad, and government is corrupt by the very ones corrupting it, and lying to our faces about it all.

Read on.

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WashingtonPost.com

How A Soccer Club Won A $1.2 Million Grant From Devos’s Education Department To Open A Charter School

by Valerie Strauss
December 3, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Here’s a new, rather remarkable story about charter school grants recently awarded by the Education Department — including one for more than $1 million that went to a soccer club in Pennsylvania that had no experience running a school.

This is one of a number of pieces I have run in recent years about the Federal Charter School Program, which has invested close to $4 billion in these schools since it began giving grants in 1995.

Charter schools, a key feature of the “school choice” movement, are financed by the public but privately operated. About 6 percent of U.S. schoolchildren attend charter schools, with California having the most charter schools and the most charter students.

Charters had bipartisan support for years, but a growing number of Democrats have pulled back from the movement, citing the fiscal impact on school districts and repeated scandals in the sector.

Charter supporters say the 30-year-old movement offers important alternatives to traditional public schools, which educate the vast majority of U.S. students, and that the movement is still learning. Opponents say there is little public accountability over many charters and that they drain resources from traditional districts.

Research shows student outcomes are, overall, largely the same in charter and traditional public schools, although there are failures and exemplars in both.

This piece, like a number of earlier ones on charters, was written by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who serves as executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit group that advocates for public education.

Burris, who opposes charter schools, was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the National Association of Secondary School Principals named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year.

I asked the Education Department to comment on the grant to the soccer club, about which Burris writes, but did not get an immediate response. I will add it if I do.

By Carol Burris

In late September 2020, amid the covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Education awarded nearly $6 million to five organizations to open new charter schools. One of the five awardees was “The All Football Club, Lancaster Lions Corporation,” located in Lancaster, Pa. The club had no experience running either a private school or a charter school, yet nevertheless pitched the AFCLL Academy Charter School for a grant from the federal Charter School Program (CSP).

The CSP awarded the football club $1,260,750 to be spent within its first five years, even though their submitted application only received 70 of 115 possible points by reviewers — a failing grade of 61 percent. And the club did not have permission from the local school board to actually open the school.

That award of tax dollars to an unauthorized charter school shines a light on how the federal CSP is driven by an ideology with only one aim — to push taxpayer dollars into the hands of would-be private charter operators, even if the school appears doomed to fail from the start.

As the Network for Public Education explained in two recent reports on the CSP program, the application reviewers, who are all

Utah Female Church Member Raped, Church Forces Her To Listen To Her Rape Recording

If you thought it couldn’t get any more weird, think again.

There are actually TWO “issues” here:

1.) What the church did to her, and;
2.) How the news reporting media is handling it.

Let’s take the 2nd one first.

Nowadays, news reporting agencies do not name the victim in cases of news reports of sexual assaults. Not identifying the victim is a good, right, proper, and just response to the problems that often occurred as a consequential by-product of naming the victims in news stories. Naming the victim served no genuine need and had no purpose as it related to reporting the story, and so in response, for the greatest part, most news reporting agencies have declined to publish the victim’s name. The obvious exception is for the stories in which a victim names a well-known/high-profile individual as the assailant/perpetrator.

That I’ve been able to find so far, there are very few news stories about the matter, and none of them name the victim.

The Scott M. Matheson Courthouse, 450 S State St, Salt Lake City, UT 84111, is the location for the Utah Supreme Court.

While normally, that isn’t a problem, per se, in this case, however, the female victim has filed suit against the church and four elders, and her case has come before the Utah State Supreme Court.

Fundamentally, what that means, is that she is named in the case as the plaintiff.

So the news reporting agencies which wrote about the story fundamentally erred by not reporting the most basic and important fact as it exists, which indeed, forms the very basis of the story – that an important, and problematic question has come before the Utah State Supreme Court and revolves around a religious practice.

The primary extant stories on the matter are by Deseret News in Utah, and the Daily Beast. The Daily Mail, The Independent, The Salt Lake Tribune, Patheos, KSL Broadcasting, and Crime Online have also published stories about the matter.

The Deseret News “is the longest-running newspaper in Utah and the state’s oldest continuously operating business.” Their story – “Utah High Court Weighs Case Of Woman Who Says Church Made Her Listen To Audio Of Her Rape” Lower courts say First Amendment prevents juries from considering case, by Annie Knox @anniebknox November 9, 2020, 6:56pm MST – may be found here:
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/11/9/21557200/utah-supreme-court-case-woman-says-church-made-her-listen-to-audio-of-her-rape-jehovahs-witnesses

The Daily Beast is a publicly-traded independent news organization focusing upon “original reporting and sharp opinion in the arena of politics, pop-culture and power.” Their story – “Will a Church Get Away With Making a Teen Listen to Recording of Her Rape?” The Jehovah’s Witnesses of Roy, Utah, say their extreme interrogation of a teenage rape victim is protected religious practice., by Emily Shugerman, Gender Reporter, published November 14, 2020 7:15PM ET – may be found here:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/will-a-jehovahs-witnesses-church-get-away-with-making-a-teen-listen-to-recording-of-her-rape

The case is: Williams v. Kingdom Hall #20190422-SC

• The case filing may be found here:
https://law.justia.com/cases/utah/court-of-appeals-published/2019/20170783-ca.html

• Amicus briefs have been filed by Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and may be found at:
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/our-work/defending-vulnerable-communities-sanctuary-cities-daca-and-more/williams-v-kingdom-hall/

• Appellate briefs may be found at the Utah State Court System website:
https://www.utcourts.gov/utc/appellate-briefs/2020/03/04/20190422-williams-v-kingdom-hall/

The oral argument before the Utah Supreme Court may be viewed online:

Now, let’s examine the first point of the matter – what the church did to her.

In order to more fully understand the question before the court, we need to know

Vote As If Your Life Depended Upon It

Tomorrow, Tuesday, 03 November 2020, is “Do, or Die,” “Make or Break” day in the United States.

Perform your civic duty tomorrow, and exercise your Right to Vote!

And for goodness’ sake… Vote for Biden/Harris!

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“Justice Is On The Ballot”: DOJ Alums Say Trump Reelection Could Be “Point Of No Return”

By Ryan J. Reilly, Senior Justice Reporter, HuffPost
Monday, November 2, 2020, 4:45 AM CST

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The Justice Department can’t take four more years of President Donald Trump.

Scores of former department officials from both political parties said that the severe damage inflicted by the president on the department and its components over the past four years will become permanent and irreversible if Trump wins a second term. The result, they said, would be a fundamental subjugation of the rule of law and the transformation of the department into an overtly political operation.

No president since Richard Nixon has had as much of a negative effect on the Justice Department as Trump. He fired one FBI director and is considering firing another. He pushed out his first attorney general and is engaging in a public campaign to pressure current Attorney General William Barr to investigate his chief political rival, Joe Biden, hinting that he might dismiss Barr if he doesn’t.

Trump bulldozed the wall between the White House and the Justice Department meant to prevent political interference in prosecutions. He unleashed an extensive campaign against the FBI, accusing the nation’s buttoned-up and conservative-leaning law enforcement agency of being behind a secret cabal to take him down. He has left the bureau to deal with the long-term, real-world damage to its reputation.

“As bad as that has been over the past four years, it would be obviously even worse over the next four years,” Greg Brower, the FBI’s former congressional liaison and a Republican appointed by President George W. Bush as Nevada’s top federal prosecutor, told HuffPost.

“I worry a great deal about what they would do with another four years in power,” former Attorney General Eric Holder told HuffPost. “People need to understand that there’s no doubt that the Department of Justice is on the ballot this year.”

A number of former U.S. attorneys who were appointed by Republican presidents ― including a man who served as both FBI and CIA director under President Ronald Reagan ― agreed. They condemned Trump, whom they called “a threat to the rule of law in our country,” and endorsed former Vice President Biden, who they said would “refocus the Justice Department on the cause of impartial justice” and help address the country’s “deep-seated societal issues.”

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have hammered home that justice is on the ballot in 2020,” said Julie Zebrak, a former Justice Department official turned political consultant. “Four more years of manipulating DOJ to serve the president’s personal agenda — and personal vendettas — could very well bring the department to the point of no return.”

Indeed, for many Justice Department employees who endured four years of the Trump administration, the outcome of the election will determine the future of their careers. Significant brain drain is a near certainty if Trump wins another term.

A White House spokesman did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Holder said that four years of Trump had done “substantial” but recoverable harm to the Justice Department. He’s not so sure if Trump wins reelection.

“After eight years you would have such structural damage done to the department that I really worry about the ability of a new administration [in 2024] to actually repair the damage that would’ve been done after eight years under Donald Trump,” Holder said.

Uncharted Waters

A few days before the 2016 election, a journalist shot off an email to his fellow reporters on the Justice Department beat, proposing Election Day drinks. It had been an unusual few months on a beat that was usually calm in the run-up to a presidential election, in part because of policies meant to prevent the department from affecting elections.

“Once every four years, it is certain that DOJ/FBI reporters will have a quiet few weeks before Election Day,” the reporter wrote. “That promise was stolen from us.”

There was FBI Director James Comey’s highly unusual press conference on Hillary Clinton’s emails in July, followed by the discovery of emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, which threw the whole campaign into chaos just days before the election. Ongoing investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election had mostly faded into the background. The focus was on

Amy Coney Barrett’s Forced Hearings Are Political Rape, And She Likes It

I have enumerated several reasons why Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett should be rejected for a seat on the United States Supreme Court.

Amy Coney Barrett: Will she follow the law of recusal? – October 15

Day 1: Judge Amy Coney Barrett Brings 6 Little Human Shields To Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing – October 12

Why Amy Coney Barrett Is Unqualified – October 6

Potential Supreme Court Nominee: Right Turn Only? – September 21

Here’s another one which points out the utter hypocrisy of the GOP and the religious right wing community in moving her nomination forward shoving her nomination down American’s throat.

Think of it as a form of political rape.

As I’ve written previously – she’s allowing herself to be used.

And apparently, she likes it.

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ReligionDispatches.org
Why Amy Coney Barrett’s Religion is Fair Game
By John Stoehr October 14, 2020

On Monday the Senate Democrats [avoided and ignored] the subject of religion. During the first day of Appellate Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, they focused on health care and how Donald Trump’s third nominee might rule after the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments next month on the Affordable Care Act. Avoiding religion was probably wise given the Republicans’ level of fake outrage over fake “religious bigotry.” The rest of us, however, don’t need to play along. Barrett’s Catholicism is fair game.

Yes, I know. Highly influential liberal pundits, and some liberal pundits striving mightily to become influential, argue that religion should be off limits. First, they say, because a person of sincerely held religious beliefs can adjudicate impartially. Second, there’s enough to talk about without bringing up Barrett’s faith. While I presume these liberals mean well (to be clear, in presuming this, I’m being generous), they’re wrong.

They assume, for one thing, that religion and politics can be disentangled. Sometimes they can be. Sometimes they can’t. For another, these liberals behave as if politics is somehow taking religion hostage. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote Monday night: “When politicians use faith as an excuse to pass and uphold laws that seize control of people’s bodies but not guarantee them healthcare, feed the poor, shelter the homeless, or welcome the stranger, you have to wonder if it’s really about faith at all.”

No, you don’t have to wonder. It’s about their faith, full stop. Millions in this country—white evangelical Protestants and conservative white Catholics chief among them—root their genuinely held religious beliefs in opposition to modernity, which is to say, in politics. There is, therefore, no appreciable difference between them. The more our society moves in the direction of greater freedom, equity and justice for all people, the more these revanchists believe their faith is under siege; and the more they feel their faith is under siege, the more prepared they are to go to war over “religious freedom.”

I don’t know if Barrett intends to help reverse Roe any more than you do. I do know—and you know—that that’s why Donald Trump picked her. That’s why she accepted his illegitimate nomination. Overturning Roe, or at least gutting it in order to

Georgia Slave Patrol

History is sometimes unimaginably ugly.

Especially when it concerns slavery.

By reading this, perhaps you can gain a greater understanding of how this abusive practice was effectively translated into vigilantism, and lynch mobs.

Perhaps as well, it’s easy to see the roots of the modern practice of “stop and frisk”  which was used widely in New York City, most notably under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, then a Republican, and other such stops and detainments simply because of the individual’s skin color, or ethnicity.

Essentially, such a procedure is a violation and denial of the Constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of movement.

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Beginning in 1757 Georgia’s colonial assembly required white landowners and residents to serve as slave patrols.

Asserting that slave insurrections must be prevented, the legislature stipulated in “An Act for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols” that groups “not exceeding seven” would work in districts twelve miles square. The statute, modeled on South Carolina’s earlier patrol law, ordered white adults to ride the roads at night, stopping all slaves they encountered and making them prove that they were engaged in lawful activities. Patrollers required slaves to produce a pass, which stated their owner’s name as well as where and when they were allowed to be away from the plantation and for how long. Patrols operated in Georgia until slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War (1861-65).

A Georgia statute ordered White adults to ride the roads at night, stopping all slaves they encountered and making them prove that they were engaged in lawful activities. Patrollers required slaves to produce a pass, which stated their owner’s name as well as where and when they were allowed to be away from the plantation and for how long.
From The Underground Railroad, by William Still

Whites could hire substitutes to patrol for them; absentees were fined. Much of the burden of patrol duty fell to non-slaveholders, who often resented what they sometimes saw as service to the planter class. The Chatham County grand jury complained in the mid-1790s about the difficulty it faced in enforcing the patrol requirement. By the early nineteenth century it became necessary to pay people to perform what had been voluntary unpaid service. In 1819 Savannah‘s city watch received one dollar for every evening they served and shared in any reward for the forced return of fugitive slaves.

To disperse any nighttime meetings, patrollers visited places where slaves often gathered. Owners feared such gatherings allowed slaves to trade stolen goods for liquor and other forbidden items.

River patrols were organized in Savannah and Augusta to combat “midnight depredations” and to

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: Former Governor Rick Scott Watched Over Unemployment System Revamp

In a recent interview published Tuesday, 04 August 2020, with Jim DeFede Investigative Reporter for WFOR-TV ch4, Miami, FL’s CBS affiliate, Governor Ron DeSantis made some startling comments, the most notable of which was about the state’s Unemployment Compensation system.

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, succeeded Rick Scott, also a Republican

While acknowledging the state’s Unemployment Compensation system was previously aged 40 or 50 years, and therefore, by some means, inefficient, it was revamped in the last 5, or 6 years during the administration of then-Governor Rick Scott, also a Republican.

While he didn’t explicitly blame the former Governor, he left little room for speculation that Rick Scott had a hand in frustrating a system for claimants and claims upon the state’s UC system.

An earlier news item published 28 May 2020 by ABC News affiliate WFTS-TV ch28 in Tampa, identified that

Trump Asked U.S. Ambassador For Favor To Help His Resort Business

Trump Asked U.S. Ambassador To Seek British Open For A Trump Resort, Ex-Diplomat Says

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/22/894354847/trump-requested-help-from-u-s-ambassador-in-holding-british-open-at-a-trump-reso

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Why does that NOT surprise me one iota?

–//–

U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV told embassy staff in 2018 that his friend, President Trump, asked him to help get the British Open golf tournament held at one of the Trump family’s golf resorts in Scotland.

U.S. Embassy staff have separately complained that Johnson made racist and sexist comments on the job.

The State Department’s Inspector General has been looking at these claims as part of a routine review of the embassy, according to people familiar with the matter. The inquiry was first reported by the New York Times and CNN.

Lewis Lukens, the embassy’s former second-in-command, confirmed in a text to NPR that Johnson told him about the president’s request.

“I advised him that doing so would violate federal ethics rules and be generally inappropriate,” Lukens wrote.

But Johnson apparently went ahead and raised the matter with David Mundell, then secretary of state for Scotland, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

The Lost Cause is the Root Cause of Violence Against Blacks

It’s Open Season on Black men and women in America.

Cops kill with impunity.

The Department of Justice (especially under this administration) does nothing.

There is NO justice in this land.

But Fortunately, Open Season on Blacks in America is Closing Soon.

Tuesday, November 3, 2020 marks the day.

That’s the day of the General Election.

And it’s time to vote OUT those with a “R” after their name, and most especially, to clean out the White House and rid it of the infestation of vermin which have afflicted it and this nation for the past 4 years.

George Floyd’s death in Minnesota is just the latest, and hopefully, the last straw – the one that proverbially broke the camel’s back in this miserably shameful and ongoing horror story.

That the POTUS has chosen to NOT address the nation during this crisis speaks volumes, none of which have any good in them.

It wasn’t too long ago that a young man in Alabama who had just entered the United States Army, and was home on leave during Thanksgiving, was shot and killed by the Hoover Police Department at the Riverchase Galleria mall in Hoover, a suburb of Birmingham on November 22, 2018.

The deceased young man was the type of person the NRA holds out as a proverbial exemplar of the “good guy with a gun” character they often tout. The only problem was, that in his case, he was Black. The fact that he was properly licensed to carry a concealed weapon – and did – made no difference.

The facts of that case were that following the sound of

Are you ready? FOUR MORE YEARS OF TRUMP

Official Portrait, President Donald Trump-R (b.1946)

Can you say…

“FOUR MORE YEARS”?

Increasingly, it looks like it’s gonna’ be yet ANOTHER Popular Vote win, and Electoral College loss for the Democrats in 2020.

And, as I have said, in a very perverse way, DT will have been VERY good for America, precisely because his abuses and corruption have pointed out every area of weakness in our laws pertaining to the Office of the President and of governmental operations, but because another recession is coming on, as Wall Street has warned, and is – once again – demonstrating that corruption by Wall $treet, the Banksters, and BIG INSURANCE still harms America.

And we have so MANY, MANY needs!

Reform of our voting systems, so that they can’t be hacked, manipulated, or gerrymandered.

So that life-saving, life-giving medications are readily and freely available to ALL The People.

So that people are AUTOMATICALLY Registered to Vote, and Vote by U.S. Postal Service mail is enabled in ALL 50 states.

So that once again, American Foreign Policy no longer unwantedly meddles in other nations’ internal affairs.

So that Healthcare is readily available to EVERYONE, not just those in cities or suburbs, and that Hospitals are OPENED and not closed.

So that The People can TRULY vote FOR their Presidential candidate of choice by ELIMINATING the Electoral College.

So that Schools and Education are not merely “adequately” funded, but have MORE than enough.

So that racist and discriminatory practices in voting registrations and purges are made ILLEGAL.

So that our Congress (House & Senate) is Term Limited to 20 years TOTAL service.

So that the security, safety, and

Should Attorney General Bill Barr Resign?

I think there’s little question that this administration is very likely the MOST corrupt administration in the history of our nation. Not even the Nixon administration could hold a candle to it.

And, to be certain, corruption needn’t be blatant, nor does it require violation of law. There is such a thing as “legal corruption,” and this POTUS and his administration are living, breathing, examples of such legal corruption.

Roger Stone, center, pictured in 1985 with fellow Republican operatives Paul Manafort, left, and Lee Atwater. (Photo By Harry Naltchayan/The Washington Post).

So, exactly what IS corruption?

While words usage and meaning often changes over a period of time, one can discern what words meant by examining their origin and derivation, which is called “etymology.”

The etymology of the word “corrupt” shows that, as an adjective, it emerged in the early 14c., and meant “corrupted, debased in character,” and was derived from the Old French word “corropt,” meaning “unhealthy, corrupt; uncouth” (of language), and came directly from the Latin word “corruptus,” which is the past participle of “corrumpere” meaning “to destroy; spoil,” while figuratively it means to “corrupt, seduce, bribe.”

The Latin word itself was an from assimilated form of the Proto-Indo-European past participle stem of “rumpere” meaning “to break,” and a Sanskrit source states that a portion of the word from that language meant “to suffer from a stomach-ache.” It was also used a verb and meant to “deprave morally, pervert from good to bad.” Around that same time, it included, and incorporated a use and meaning to be “guilty of dishonesty involving bribery.”

There is a “longstanding difficulty about the term “corruption” and its use in social science and political advocacy.”

“Corruption” implies deviation from some ideal state, and so defining corruption usually involves an implicit or explicit selection of a baseline standard of “correct” behavior. The three most common possibilities – none entirely satisfactory – are:

1. Law (“corruption” entails violation of specific legal prohibitions on, say, bribery, nepotism, embezzlement, etc.)

2. Public opinion (“corruption” involves acts, or patterns of behavior, that would be viewed by most citizens as wrongful abuses of power, whether or not they are illegal)

3. Public interest (“corruption” involves acts, or patterns of behavior, that contravene the public interest—whether or not the actions in question are illegal and/or the subject of widespread disapproval).

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University writes that there are “…two specific forms of corruption across American states: illegal and legal.

We define illegal corruption as the private gains in the form of cash or gifts by a government official, in exchange for providing specific benefits to private individuals or groups.

“It is the form of corruption that attracts a great deal of public attention. A second form of corruption, however, is becoming more and more common in the U.S.: legal corruption.

We define legal corruption as the political gains in the form of campaign contributions or endorsements by a government official, in exchange for providing specific benefits to private individuals or groups, be it by explicit or implicit understanding.

“Such dealings are, in turn, one aspect of the broader issue of Institutional Corruption which,

Woman Is STILL The Nigger Of The World: Violence Against Women, A Global Problem

What do Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Angela Merkel of Germany, Brigitte Macron of France, Aung San Suu Kyi of Indonesia, and Sonia Gandi of India have in common?

If you guessed that they are subjects of Italian artist Alexsandro Palombo, then you’d be correct.

In the images, all the women all have black eyes, numerous additional wounds to their face, cuts and bruises to their neck and upper torso, including fresh blood… it is explicitly clear that they all have suffered at the hands of an abuser.

Fortunately, the pictures are pure fiction.

In each of the images of the women, the artist digitally altered photographs of them to make it appear as if they all have been victims of savage assault.

The artist Alexsandro Palombo‘s work is on display in Milan, Italy, and his FaceBook site is linked to his name.

Using a computer software to alter the images, the

Why Should Churches Should Be Taxed?

Ownership of these churches in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe was transferred to the parishes. As a result, the churches are excluded from the bankruptcy estate available to clergy abuse victims. [Photographer: William LeGoullon for Bloomberg Businessweek]

Tax churches because they’re businesses, plain and simple. The product or service they provide is religion and/or spirituality.

Bloomberg Business News published the findings of their most recent financial investigation, which showed that – as expected – like any nominally competent business organization, or conglomerated international corporation, the Catholic Church in the United States has moved to protect its assets from being considered part of any potential judgments/settlements arising from individual or Class Action lawsuits initiated by individuals (plaintiffs) who as children were abused by priests, and now are adults.

From a business perspective, one could think of it as the Church opposing members who may be potential or prospective “creditors” in any liability arising from sex abuse cases.

The Federal Government needs to RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) them, because they’re clearly corrupt as evidenced by:
• Perpetrating, and perpetuating, sexual abuse, by;
• Deliberately hiding and shuffling perpetrator priests, and by;
• Deliberately shifting and hiding assets in response to lawsuits.

Catholic Church Shields $2 Billion in Assets to Limit Abuse Payouts

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-01-08/the-catholic-church-s-strategy-to-limit-payouts-to-abuse-victims

“In many cases, churches precede bankruptcy by transferring and reclassifying assets.

“The effect is to shrink the pot of money available to clergy abuse victims.

“That and Chapter 11’s [bankruptcy] universal settle­ments and protections from further claims have been an effective

Pentagon Excesses, Fraud, Waste, and Abuse

Recently, the Washington Post published the results of a lengthy, in-depth, years-long investigation into the War in Afghanistan, which were published only after even more years of prolonged court battles.

See: The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war

At war with the truth

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.

By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

“A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

“The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

“The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

See:

The Afghanistan Papers

Part 1: At war with the truth

Part 1

At war with the truth

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.

Part 2

Stranded without a strategy

Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.

Part 3

Built to fail

Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in “nation-building,” it has wasted billions doing just that

Part 4

Consumed by corruption

The U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled

Part 5

Unguarded nation

Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption

Part 6

Overwhelmed by opium

The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn

Interviews and memos

Explore the documents

Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history

Post Reports

‘We didn’t know what the task was’

Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

The fight for the documents
About the investigation

“It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records.

“In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

“With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

News of the Washington Post’s news was widespread, and numerous news reporting outlets and agencies reported on and shared the Post’s findings. One such outlet was The Guardian.

See:

Afghanistan papers reveal US public were misled about unwinnable war

By Peter Beaumont

Mon 9 Dec 2019 09.13 EST Last modified on Mon 9 Dec 2019 15.30 EST

Interviews with key insiders reveal damning verdict on conflict that cost 2,300 US lives

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/09/afghan-papers-reveal-us-public-were-misled-about-unwinnable-war

“Hundreds of confidential interviews with key figures involved in prosecuting the 18-year US war in Afghanistan have revealed that the US public has been consistently misled about an unwinnable conflict.

“Transcripts of the interviews, published by the Washington Post after a three-year legal battle, were collected for a Lessons Learned project by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a federal agency whose main task is eliminating corruption and inefficiency in the US war effort.

“The 2,000 pages of documents reveal the bleak and unvarnished views of many insiders in a war that has cost $1tn (£760bn) and killed more than 2,300 US servicemen and women, with more than 20,000 injured. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have died in the conflict.” …

Imagine that… ONE TRILLION dollars wasted down a rat hole, and being lied to about it all. What could we have done with that money? What would an extra $20 Billion looked like to each of the 50 states? That’s how much they would’ve had were it divvied up that way. Or, expressed another way, that’s a little over $3000 for every man, woman, and child now residing in the United States.

Oh… how about improved our national infrastructure?

Or, how about improved delivery of healthcare to our citizen-residents, their families, children, and elderly?

Or, how about improving and shoring up Social Security Trust Fund? That one could be more easily and readily accomplished by making it a “HANDS OFF!” account, and forbidding use/disbursement of its money for any other purpose than for claims upon it, thus making is solvent into perpetuity. But, Congress likes to use that money as a practical “slush fund” to pay for things that they don’t have the guts to raise taxes to pay for. THAT MUST CHANGE!!

But, nearly 20 years ago, exactly one day BEFORE the now-infamous day of September 11, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delivered an address which was broadcast live throughout all DOD installations worldwide, was published on the DOD website, and was entitled “Bureaucracy to Battlefield.

On the DOD website, the page was entitled as “Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld at the DOD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week Kickoff – Bureaucracy to Battlefield, Sept. 10, 2001,” and in pertinent part, his speech included the following remarks:

Matt Bevin can rot in hell.

Thus read Friday the 13th’s headline in the December 2019 edition of the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky.

Why such a votriolic headline?

Shitbag former KY GOP Governor Matt Bevin did this on his way out the door following his re-re-election loss, as reported by NPR:

“Bevin, a Republican who narrowly lost a bid for a second term last month, issued pardons to hundreds of people, including convicted rapists, murderers and drug offenders.

“In one case, Bevin pardoned a man convicted of homicide. That man’s family raised more than $20,000 at a political fundraiser to help Bevin pay off a debt owed from his 2015 gubernatorial campaign.

“In all, the former governor signed off on 428 pardons and commutations since his loss to Democrat Andy Beshear, according to The Courier-Journal. The paper notes, “The beneficiaries include one offender convicted of raping a child, another who hired a hit man to kill his business partner and a third who killed his parents.””

As the BBC reported in reported their story, “US governor issues 428 pardons during final days in office,”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50786368

“The Republican pardoned a convicted child rapist as well as a convicted murderer whose brother raised money for Mr Bevin’s election campaign. 

“Mr Bevin was defeated by Democrat Andy Beshear in November after a contentious election. 

“The flurry of pardons sent shockwaves through the state’s legal system. State prosecutors told local media they had not been consulted on Mr Bevin’s decision, and families of the victims were not notified in advance. 

“”I’m a big believer in second chances,” Mr Bevin said in a statement to the Washington Post newspaper. “I think this is a nation that was founded on the concept of redemption and second chances and new pages in life.””

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/former-kentucky-governor-defends-pardons-argues-american-is-a-nation-that-supports-redemption/2019/12/13/526f346a-1e04-11ea-b4c1-fd0d91b60d9e_story.html

Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) on Friday night defended his controversial pardons as reflections of America’s foundational “support for redemption,” a statement that followed a Republican state leader’s call for a federal investigation into Bevin’s actions.

The former governor, who lost his bid for reelection in November, made national headlines this week after he pardoned hundreds of people during his final days in office, including a man convicted of reckless homicide, a child rapist and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash. In one case, Bevin pardoned a man convicted of homicide who was the brother of one of the former governor’s campaign donors.

The pardons outraged local attorneys and prosecutors, who said they were not consulted during the process. As the backlash continued to build Friday, Republicans in the Kentucky state Senate issued a statement blasting Bevin.

And, as reported by the Courier-Journal, “.”

Kentuckians are outraged, and even his most ardent former supporters are shocked. “Nonplussed” is far too diplomatic a word to describe their thoughts of his actions.

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/ky-legislature/2019/12/13/bevin-pardons-robert-stivers-calls-federal-investigation/2641276001/

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/2019/12/13/mcconnell-calls-bevins-pardons-completely-inappropriate/2640602001/

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/ky-governor/2019/12/13/bevin-pardons-kentucky-lawmaker-calls-new-ag-investigate/2636713001/

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/joseph-gerth/2019/12/13/matt-bevin-pardons-letting-rapists-killers-go-shows-true-identity/2638295001/

“Bevin was known to issue pardons on July Fourth and Christmas Day during his time in office as a way to mark the country’s independence and holiday season. The individuals who were pardoned in those situations typically were Kentuckians who committed minor crimes and had demonstrated good behavior while incarcerated.

“But before leaving office, Bevin’s pardons included many violent and sexual offenders such as a man convicted of raping a 9-year-old, another who hired a hit man to kill his business partner, a man who killed his parents and a man who beheaded a woman before stuffing her in a barrel.”

https://amp.courier-journal.com/amp/2639681001

—//—

While pardons, sentence commutations, and other types of clemency are within executive privilege, they should be righteously and judiciously wielded with wisdom, rather than wantonly abused as returned favors, or reckless examples of personal vendetta, and should be targeted to include resolution of actual or possible miscarriages of justice, such as restoration of voting rights following conviction, or other realistic social/civic benefits.

Welcome The F-35 Lightning II To Alabama!

I’ve just heard/read the news that the 187th Fighter Wing at Dannelly Field in Montgomery has been chosen to get a fleet of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Mission jet aircraft.

That’s the $1.45 TRILLION-dollar TOTAL LIFETIME OPERATION COST of operations, cost-overrun, over-budget, faulty, so-called “do-everything” aircraft which can’t do an aerial “dogfight,” and the money already spent upon it ($350Billion) could have LITERALLY purchased a “McMansion-priced home” ($600K – over 2x the average price of the average US house), for EVERY SINGLE HOMELESS person in our nation –and– had plenty of money left over.

It’s part and parcel of what late, former WWII Supreme Allied Commander, former-two term Republican POTUS Dwight David Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex” in his Farewell Address the evening of January 17, 1961, as a two-term Republican, under whose leadership our nation grew like “gangbusters,” our infrastructure expanded phenomenally and exponentially, and under who the Personal Income Tax Rates upon the VERY WEALTHIEST of Americans was 90%+, with Corporate Income Tax Rates 40+%.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Members of Congress: Virtual American Royalty… At Taxpayer Expense

Members of Congress as virtual royalty,
have raised their pay 9 times over 9 years,
but raised Minimum Wage only 3 times in 18 years.
While Congress now pays themselves almost
3x the Median Household Income,
since 2000,
Inflation has totaled 37.4%.
And with 72% subsidies, Employer Contributions,
and other
luxurious perks unavailable to the Average Citizen,
including full Retirement Vestment after 5 years,
and 72% subsidy for Healthcare Insurance in Retirement,
their Healthcare is practically free.
And you’re paying for it.
But yours is not.
And you’re paying for it, too!

Members first received $6 a day in 1789, today they get $174,000 annually, in addition to phenomenal perks, health insurance, and retirement… all at taxpayer expense.

Presently, Congress also gets:

Mary Jo West Confirms Leigh Corfman’s Roy Moore Abuse Story

November 11 at 9:34AM

I need to say something, not because I want to get political, but because I know the truth and I need to tell it.

The now-national story about Roy Moore and Leigh Corfman is true, and I have known it for over 20 years. Leigh’s mother and step-father have been friends of mine since 1992 and I know them to be the best of people. We don’t share the same political beliefs but we love and respect each other on a level deeper than politics and these wonderful friends tell the truth. They are caring and educated and accomplished people who would choose privacy over headlines any day.

Leigh’s mother told me and others “The Roy Moore Story” in the mid-1990s, because her daughter had finally unburdened herself after years of silence and that burden lay dark and deep on a mother’s shoulders and in that mother’s heart. I listened to the same details as those that are printed now, and while some of the story has faded with time, several facts are seared into my brain: 1) the attacker was attorney Roy Moore and the victim was then teenager Leigh Corfman; 2) Roy Moore got Leigh to his house under false pretenses; 3) Roy Moore made overt sexual advances to Leigh which involved Roy Moore coming out of the bathroom undressed and ready for action; 4) Leigh was terrified and had the good sense to say NO and Roy Moore accepted her NO.

During Roy Moore’s political ascent, I’ve almost called Leigh’s mother many times to suggest that they expose who Roy Moore is at his core, but I realize that this story is Leigh’s to tell… no one else’s. Why has she not exposed him before now? Perhaps because no one likes being called a liar – and she is being called that now. Perhaps because that secret was safer locked away from the pain that she must be reliving now and having to deal with all over again.

Whatever it is, it is NOT a political conspiracy. Leigh’s parents bleed Republican red as long as I have known them…and Leigh says she has voted Republican in the last three elections. While this story has the “He said, She said” element, surely the counterbalance on the scales in Leigh’s favor is US…the group of friends who knew the story before it was a headline. There was simply no reason for Leigh to make this story up when she was young and trying to figure out life. Roy Moore’s terrifying advances surely had to complicate the path that she admitted was filled with choices she would like to redo. She owned them, admirably, but I wonder if some of her young years might have been easier if she hadn’t been abused by Roy Moore when she was 14 years old, vulnerable and confused.

Perhaps it’s simply that it’s time to shout from the rooftops that this man, Roy Moore…who wants our nation’s trust and our belief that he is a good man… simply doesn’t deserve our trust. He lied yesterday when he said he had never met Leigh Corfman. Maybe he’s gotten too old to act on his abnormal urges now, but in his heart, he still knows that when he could, he scared and emotionally scarred young women and in that chamber of his heart, his blood still runs mean and cold.

I believe in redemption and forgiveness. I’ve asked for forgiveness many times in my life, but first, you have to acknowledge that you did something wrong. And yesterday Roy Moore stood staunch and unyielding that he did no wrong. Take a lie detector test, Mr. Moore. There’s nothing fake in this story. Roy Moore is lying. This story happened and it was shared mother-to-mother with no agenda other than to get it off her chest and share her agony. Women friends do that, thankfully. Leigh’s mother told me this story when Roy Moore was a nobody…now he’s just a lying somebody.

Just because Leigh Corfman didn’t come forward and tell this horrific story about a bad man until now, doesn’t mean that it never happened. It’s her story. Yes, it was a long time coming, but

Exposing Right Wing Religious Hypocrisy

It’s time, once again, to play… “Let’s Pretend!”

Let’s pretend you’re religious. Not everyone is. Should you use the force of government, or the rule of law to mandate that others abide by the edicts of your religious convictions?

That’s the essence of what Christian Evangelicals, Protestants, Catholics and others are doing when they deny prescription birth control (contraception for women), or abortion. Here’s why: It’s religious. That’s fairly simple enough to understand. And “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Besides, they’re cloaked under the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing auspices of “Christian” businesses, because hey… Jesus suffered, died & was resurrected for Businesses & Corporations – right?

But the hypocrisy, religious abuse, and charlatanism doesn’t end there. If EVERY person whom opposed abortion would agree to pay for an unintended pregnancy, and accept the newborn into their home… wait – hardly anyone does that, not even religious folk. But it’s not about religion, it’s about the control, and subjugation of women, using so-called “religious” pretext.

But let’s not have logic interfere with our motives. So, here’s a series of Tweets by

Me too… #MeToo

Recently, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, the “Me Too” meme has been trending.

See: http://www.npr.org/2017/10/16/558165331/in-the-wake-of-harvey-weinstein-scandal-women-say-metoo

See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/the-movement-of-metoo/542979/

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/technology/metoo-twitter-facebook.html

The “Me Too” meme is, in large part, a response to recent revelations of Hollywood Motion Picture/Television Producer Harvey Weinstein’s longtime sexual abuse of women, in close succession to, and conjunction with revelations of similar long-term abuse by late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, comedian Bill Cosby who is accused of chronic use of “date rape drugs“ on women, and former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY, 9) who plead guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor for “sexting” (sending sexually explicit images, aka “dick pics”) to a 15-year-old girl with whom he connected via Twitter.

Women decided to show the world how many of them have been victimized sexually.

Men have also been sexually abused – as adults and as children – just like women.

However, sexual abuse just happens to be more prevalent among women.

Sexual abuse is a crime, regardless of to whom it happens, regardless of age.

Any unwanted sexual behavior of an adult is a criminal act, and

Government–Mandated Waste Drives Up Prescription Drug Co$t$

 

Just Like Food “Expiration” Dates, Drug “Expiration” Dates Are Also Fake… And It’s Co$ting You BIGTIME

Hospitals and pharmacies are required to toss expired drugs, no matter how expensive or vital. Meanwhile the FDA has long known that many remain safe and potent for years longer.

The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Most were 30 to 40 years past their expiration dates – possibly toxic, probably worthless.
But to Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, the cache was an opportunity to answer an enduring question about the actual shelf life of drugs: Could these drugs from the bell-bottom era still be potent?

Cantrell called Roy Gerona, a University of California, San Francisco, researcher who specializes in analyzing chemicals. Gerona had grown up in the Philippines, and had seen people recover from sickness by taking expired drugs with no apparent ill effects.

“This was very cool,” Gerona says. “Who gets the chance of analyzing drugs that have been in storage for more than 30 years?”

Pharmacist and Toxicologist Lee Cantrell tested medicines that had been “expired” for decades. Most of them were still potent enough to be on shelves today. (Lee Huffaker for ProPublica)

The age of the drugs might have been bizarre, but the question the researchers wanted to answer wasn’t.

Pharmacies across the country in major medical centers and in neighborhood strip malls routinely toss out tons of scarce and potentially valuable prescription drugs when they hit their expiration dates.

Gerona and Cantrell, a pharmacist and toxicologist, knew that the term “expiration date” was a misnomer. The dates on drug labels are simply

Don’t Get Burned By Prejudice

Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors and ascended to the Roman throne at age 17 following the death of his great uncle Claudius the emperor. 

Nero, who was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, was the son of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina, the great-granddaughter of the emperor Augustus. 

After Ahenobarbus died in 48CE, Agrippina married her uncle, the emperor Claudius, and persuaded him to name Nero as his successor rather than his own son, Britannicus, and to offer his daughter, Octavia, as Nero’s wife, which he did two years later.

Claudius’ death in 54CE is widely suspected as poisoning by Agrippina, and thereafter, Nero delivered a eulogy to the Senate in Claudius’ honor, was named Emperor of Rome, and took the name Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

Agrippina was manipulatively domineering and

Mobile Alabama MD & Medical Practice Settle Medicare, Medicaid & TRICARE Fraud Claims

The Department of Justice, United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District, announced that Mobile, Alabama physician Dr. James Matthew Crumb, MD (AL license number MD.24535, AL Controlled Substances Certificate ACSC.245, National Provider Identifier: 1629079793 ) a Physical Medicine and Rehabilitative physician who currently practices as Mobility Metabolism and Wellness (MMW), and a local neurosurgeon group Coastal Neurological Institute, P.C. (CNI), 3280 Dauphin Street, Suite A, Mobile, AL 36606-4060, (NPI:1740212174), have collectively paid $1.4 million to settle allegations that they violated the False Claims Act (“FCA”) by engaging in fraudulent schemes to maximize payment from the Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE health care programs.

In late December 2015, the United States Attorney’s Office filed a civil lawsuit against Defendants CNI, Crumb, and MMW, on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, alleging that the Defendants knowingly billed federal health care programs for

How can you know if you’re in an Emotionally Abusive Relationship?

Just because there’s no physical violence, does that mean a relationship isn’t abusive?

No.

The adage, “can’t see the forest for the trees” is particularly true in emotionally abusive relationships, and it’s not uncommon for men and women in them to be unable to identify the relationship as being abusive.

Why is that?

It goes back to 1973 and an unsuccessful bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in which two perpetrators – both repeat offender prisoners – took four hostages, three women and one man. Over the six days they were held, the hostages began to identify and sympathize with their captors.

Hostages in the Norrmalmstorg Kreditbanken bank vault, Stockholm, Sweden. The 1973 robbery gave rise to the term “Stockholm Syndrome” which characterized a scenario in which captives sympathized with their captors.

As the standoff was ending, police called for the hostages to come out first, but the four captives – who protected their abductors to the very end – refused. One female hostage, 23-year old Kristin Enmark, called out, “No, Jan and Clark go first—you’ll gun them down if we do! We want to leave with the robber!”

When police seized the gunmen, two female hostages cried sympathetically, “Don’t hurt them – they didn’t harm us!”

When interviewed by investigators and others following the crisis’ conclusion, the hostages reported fearing Law Enforcement Officers’ rescue effort attempts, and felt their captors were protecting them from harm. The bonds formed during that stand-off had become so strong that there were reports of one female hostage who had been engaged to be married to one of the kidnappers – which was later discovered to be false, though it is true that one hostage developed a Legal Defense Fund to help pay the perpetrators’ criminal defense costs.

Researcher Ian K.Mackenzie wrote
in “Journal For Police Crisis Negotiations”
that Stockholm Syndrome consisted of:
“strong emotional ties that develop between two persons
where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.”

Psychological researchers utilizing the FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System (HOBAS) – the only entity that compiles national statistics on crisis incidents (hostage, barricade, and/or suicide) which are used in research and decision making – found that

Made In Alabama: Politics Like A Shakespearean Drama Thanks To #ALpolitics @GovernorBentley!

Lies & deception have an expiration date.
The truth lives forever.

New pictures emerge of Alabama Governor Bentley and his “Political Advisor” cum mistress, Rebekah Mason. Pun intended.

Rethinking Addiction

Perhaps you’ve studied the 12-Step program, or perhaps you’ve practiced it. I have done both. Practicing it was not as a matter of addiction, or any such thing for myself, but instead, was a part of my personal spiritual growth and development.

Over the years, I’ve heard commentary, or news features which interviewed people with divergent perspectives on 12-Step programs, most notably which were skeptical of them, and were thoughtfully seeking answers themselves for the “whys and wherefores” of substance abuse, whether it’s long-term or temporary, and whether it is a genetic fault, or if it is a personality or character flaw in response to external or internal stressors. In other words, it’s the classic “Heredity vs Environment” argument.

As I have come to view it, there is validity for both sides, but I think the stronger case is made for a combination of environment and character flaw, instead of genetic defect.

—/—

“In his recent book, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, Lance Dodes, a retired psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School, looked at Alcoholics Anonymous’s retention rates along with studies on sobriety and rates of active involvement (attending meetings regularly and working the program) among AA members. Based on these data, he put AA’s actual success rate somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. That is just a rough estimate, but it’s the most precise one I’ve been able to find.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous
By Gabrielle Glaser, April 2015 Issue
Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found

“Too Big To Fail” Banks Get Bailout, Gave Customers The Shaft

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

---

Chalk One Up for the Working Man

By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published (via Facebook) on December 18, 2016
Used with permission

On Thursday, I tried a case for a close friend on mine in the Jefferson County, Alabama District Court in Bessemer, Alabama. My friend is a hard working Bessemer resident and family man whose world was turned upside down when Citibank sold his credit card account to San Diego-based junk debt buyer, Midland Funding, LLC. He is one of millions of bank credit card customers each year whose accounts are bundled in loan pools and then sold to junk debt buyers without the customer’s knowledge.

Midland Funding is one of several mega junk debt buyers in America. This group of financial sharks buys unsecured bank debt for pennies on a dollar and then strong arms debtors who miss one or more of their monthly payments. Midland is part of a multi-billion industry of shady financial predators.

In my friend’s case, Citibank sold his account to Midland Funding. The balance on the account was $6,800. My friend paid his credit card monthly on a regular basis, but had an unexpected hiccup in his monthly cash flow a couple of years after he opened the account. As a result he failed to make a couple of his payments on time. When this occurred Citibank sold my friend’s account to Midland, and Midland eventually sued my friend. This is how my friend became my client.

Remember, Citibank had a similar hiccup during the Great Recession of 2008. The bank requested and received a total of $181.6 billion in federal bailout assistance to keep from collapsing. In fact, Citibank led the banking industry’s “welfare queens” by receiving more financial bailout assistance than any big bank in the U.S.

Citibank’s “Thank You” to the taxpayers like my client, whose tax dollars made the financial bailout possible for these big banks, was the low-down act of selling his credit card account to a shark like Midland Funding. The big banks were quick to take taxpayer-sponsored financial assistance, but slow to give taxpayers similar financial assistance in return.

[Editor’s Note: Alamerica Bank, which is

Hillary & Trump: Two Deeply Flawed Candidates

By many accounts, the 2016 Presidential Election year is a complete campaign in the ass. Two deeply flawed candidates manipulated and exposed deeply flawed processes in both major political parties, not the least of which is for the GOP, how to vet their candidates more thoroughly, and have the ability to remove them from official party candidacy, and for the Democrats, how to maintain candidate neutrality, and prevent party officials from influencing candidates of the top officials’ choosing toward nomination. I predict many much-needed changes on the horizon for both parties… following the November General Election.

—/—

by Gary Cosby, Jr.
Used with permission

WARNING:  This is a long post. It is also my final political post before the election.

I am not an editorial writer but today I am going to play one on Facebook. First, let me say, everyone is welcome to comment; however, if your comment uses foul language or is abusive to anyone else, your comment will be deleted. One of the great problems we have today is our lack of ability to disagree and still have civil discourse; therefore, we will practice it or be censured. Keep in mind, this is my opinion and you do not have to agree with it. Thank your First Amendment rights for that.

By now, we all know this presidential election cycle has presented us with the two poorest candidates in memory, perhaps in all of American history. Certainly there have been poor candidates running for one party or the other throughout our history but not facing one another in the same election.

They have turned the presidential debates into bad Saturday Night Live skits. In fact, I doubt the writers of SNL would have been able to dream up anything this hideous. The American political scene will never be the same and

Your Tax Dollars At Work: Taxpayers Subsidize CEO Pay, Here’s How #BonusLoophole

Executive Excess 2016: The Wall Street CEO Bonus Loophole

This 23rd annual report reveals how taxpayers are subsidizing financial crisis windfalls.

By Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati, August 31, 2016

This report is the first to calculate how much taxpayers have been subsidizing executive bonuses at the nation’s largest banks.

The study focuses on a 1993 Clinton administration reform that was intended to rein in runaway CEO pay by capping the tax deductibility of executive compensation at $1 million. But the new rule included a huge loophole for stock options and other “performance” pay. As a result, the more corporations hand out in executive bonuses, the lower their tax bill. This perverse incentive for excessive compensation has been a major factor in the explosion of CEO pay.

The financial bailout program closed this loophole for recipients, but only until

Why Hillary Clinton’s State Dept Quid Pro Quo Pay-To-Play Is A Corrupt Practice

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

---

Formerly titled “Why @HillaryClinton’s @StateDept Quid Pro Quo Pay-To-Play Is A Corrupt Practice”

Accountability is what remains once responsibility has fled. The citizens of the United States must demand higher standards from their public servants, and officials, and severely punish violations of the same.

—/—

Bill and Hillary Clinton, Meet Jozette Berry, Alisha Cole and Lashonda Smaw

By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published (via Facebook) on August 28, 2016
Used with permission.

Former Jefferson County, Alabama revenue clerks Lashonda Smaw, Alisha Cole, and Gazette Berry (pictured from left to right). They engaged in the same unethical conduct that is involved in the Hillary Clinton “cash for prioritized access” scandal. Each woman was investigated, criminally charged with felony ethics violations, and convicted in court. Their total take in gratuities was $120. The total gratuities involved in the Clinton scandal is $156 million, and nobody is under a criminal investigation.

In 2013, Jozette Berry, Alisha Cole and Lashonda Smaw were Jefferson County, Alabama revenue clerks who worked in the downtown County Courthouse and the Center Point Satellite Courthouse. These low-level public servants accepted cash gratuities for cutting people to the front of the 4-hour long, slow moving, car tag line. Cole was caught accepting $20 on two occasions in August 2013. Berry and Smaw were caught accepting $40 on a single occasion in April 2013.

After a local Fox TV news team publicly exposed this criminal conduct, there was immediate and widespread condemnation of the women’s actions. It made national news. This was declared an ethics violation on the part of each woman.

In December 2013, a Jefferson County grand jury indicted Berry, Cole, and Smaw for using their public office for personal gain, which is a felony in Alabama and an ethics violation as well. Each woman faced 2 to 20 years in prison, if convicted.

These women did not have friends in high places. They were not connected to the Obama White House, or the U.S. Attorney General, or the Director of the FBI. They did not hold any political office. They did not have New York spin-doctors or high-powered lawyers to argue that they had done nothing wrong. In short, they had no one who could “fix” their criminal case, or make it go away.

Jozette Berry and Lashonda Smaw, who are black, eventually pled guilty. Alisha Cole, who faced two felony counts of ethics violations, went to trial and was convicted. Berry received a sentence of 12 months of hard labor in the county jail. Imposition of Berry’s sentence was later suspended and she was placed on 2 years of unsupervised probation. After her conviction, Cole received a three-year suspended sentence and two years of unsupervised probation. Smaw’s sentence for her ethics violation is unknown at this time.

The guilty pleas for Berry and Smaw and guilty verdict for Cole ended a multi-year joint criminal investigation by the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Public Corruption and White Collar Crimes Unit, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, and the Birmingham Police Department. After the criminal cases ended in May 2015, the local DA proudly released the following statement: “We are grateful to have partners in law enforcement who are

The @JusticeDept Readies Its Case: 10 Questions About United States v #ALpolitics @GovernorBentley, @rebmason, et al

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

---

USA v. Robert J. Bentley, Rebekah Caldwell Mason, and Other Co-Conspirators

By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published (via Facebook) on April 19, 2016
Used with permission

Alabama Governor Robert J. Bentley, 73, and political consultant Rebekah Caldwell Mason, 40, are expected to be charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) for using Bentley’s position as governor to execute a wide ranging racketeering conspiracy involving wire and mail fraud, tax fraud, bribery, money laundering, the unauthorized use of the federal National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and the Law Enforcement Tactical System (LETS) databases, and related criminal charges.

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley and paramour-cum-Senior Political Advisor Rebekah Caldwell Mason

 

As we announced exclusively on April 9, 2016, federal prosecutors in Washington have decided to expedite the initiation of public corruption charges against Robert Bentley and Rebekah Mason. This article takes you deep inside the criminal case against the governor and his married lover.

Mason, a mother of three young children, is trying to stay out of jail by cooperating with the federal probe. She does not have the financial resources to mount a spirited or sustained defense to the expected criminal charges.

Bentley, whose criminal defense attorneys are paid from campaign funds and personal savings, is helping Rebekah Mason fund her criminal defense by keeping Jonathan Mason, her husband, on the state payroll as the director of Serve Alabama at an annual salary of $94,000. This financial assistance, however, is woefully inadequate considering the tidal wave of legal trouble Rebekah Mason faces.

Robert Bentley, Rebekah Mason and other co-conspirators are staring down the barrel of a criminal indictment that is expected to exceed ninety felony charges once the case has been presented to a federal grand jury. Bentley will be named as the “ringleader” of the racketeering conspiracy.

The commonly asked questions about the governor’s criminal conduct and

Alabama #ALpolitics @GovernorBentley Abused Office As Evidenced By Aircraft Use

—UPDATED 13 April 2016 to add helicopter/wallet detail.—

Alabama Governor Bentley used numerous state aircraft several hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of times, including ones registered to, or leased by the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, and Alabama Department of Transportation – not just the governor’s “official” craft, and used state money to pay for even more charters with numerous other private firms.

 

In fact, since the day of his initial inauguration, he and former wife Dianne flew 749 times – more than TWICE as much as former Governor Fob James.

 

The number of aircraft flights taken by former Alabama First Lady Dianne Bentley, and paramour Rebeka Caldwell Mason are telling.

The destinations and purposes for many, if not most, of the trips – including ones he made for campaigning – were purposely vaguely listed to

Even With #ALpolitics @ALGOP & @GovernorBentley’s Iron-Fisted Control, Alabama STILL Thanks God for Mississippi

Fraud, waste, and abuse are rampant in Sweet Home, and it’s KILLING the state.

Cronyism and corruption remains alive and well, despite claims to the contrary as asserted by the GOP, which now rules Alabama with an Iron Fist.

If it could be said that states have personalities, Alabama’s would be bipolar, and schizophrenic. Reeling from fear – though they deny it – they continue to perpetuate and indeed, cultivate the very worst of the very worst in human behavior.

It’s not that Alabama or its people are bad, it’s that fear rules their hearts, and fearing that want and poverty will overtake them (ALERT! It already has.), they continue to elect those who pander to their fears. As a result, they get what they deserve.

It’s HIGH TIME – as was said in the Star Trek television series – “to BOLDLY go where no man has gone before!”

No one praises cowards, or cowardice. And yet, so many praise Alabama’s politicians, who are veritable Cowardly Lions.

Alabama has had – and continues to have

#ALpolitics Robert @GovernorBentley Update

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

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Robert Bentley Update

by Donald V. Watkins
Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Our report for the U.S. Department of Justice on Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s criminal conduct in office has been written and vetted by our editors and attorneys. The report, which grew out of our

Criminal Conduct Update: #ALpolitics Robert @GovernorBentley

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

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Robert Bentley Update

by Donald Watkins, Monday, 16 November 2015 8:30PM CST

Alabama Governor, Robert Bentley – (R)

Our report for the U.S. Department of Justice on Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s criminal conduct in office has been written. The report, which grew out of our Facebook news team’s special series of investigative articles titled “Forbidden Love” and “Executive Betrayal“, is undergoing a review by our editors and legal team. The report is tentatively scheduled to be delivered to the Justice Department on

#ALpolitics @GovernorBentley Hoodwinks @YHN & @ALdotcom

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

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Bentley Hoodwinks Yellowhammer News and AL.com

Alabama Governor Bentley with paramour/ Rebekah Caldwell Mason, Communications Director cum Senior Political Advisor

by Donald V. Watkins
Published via Facebook Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Used with permission

Once again, Governor Robert Bentley has hoodwinked Yellowhammer News and AL.com. This time, Bentley has deceived these two news organizations by providing them with a handful of sanitized text messages between Rebekah Caldwell Mason and himself in response to their separate Open Records requests for emails and text messages between the two lovers.

Like former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Bentley withheld the more embarrassing text messages about his illicit love affair with Rebekah from public disclosure. Of particular significance are the text messages where Bentley describes his true love for Rebekah, including a text message Bentley thought he was sending to Rebekah that he mistakenly sent to his former wife Dianne instead.

KWAME MALIK KILPATRICK
MDOC Number: 702408
SID Number: 3353708P
Name: KWAME MALIK KILPATRICK
Racial Identification: Black
Gender: Male
Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Height: 6′ 4″
Weight: 310 lbs.
Date of Birth: 06/08/1970 (45)
KWAME MALIK KILPATRICK Image Date: 5/25/2010

Yellowhammer bought into

Department of Justice Report on #ALpolitics @GovernorBentley Now Underway

Alabama Governor Bentley with paramour Communications Director/Senior Political Advisor Rebekah Caldwell Mason

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

---

DOJ Report on Bentley Underway

By Donald V. Watkins
Published via Facebook October 11, 2015, 9:54am
Used with permission

Our Facebook news teams is in the process of preparing a detailed prosecutorial memorandum on Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s misuse of taxpayer and donor money to carry on a love affair with Rebekah Caldwell Mason, his senior political advisor. It is anticipated that the report will be

#ALpolitics @FirstLadyDB: Strength in the Face of Domestic Abuse

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

---

Dianne Bentley: Strength in the Face of Domestic Abuse

By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published (via Facebook) on September 23, 2015.
Used with permission

In her official state biography on the Governor’s website, it states, “If Mrs. Bentley can be remembered for one thing as First Lady, she hopes that the people of Alabama will remember her stand for Christ. After all, the Bentleys feel that they have been called “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14) and always strive to remain in God’s will.”

Governor Robert Bentley abused Dianne Bentley emotionally, psychologically, and verbally. The abuse started when Rebekah Mason became Bentley’s closest advisor and lover during the governor’ first term in office. Bentley’s domestic abuse of Dianne was pervasive, degrading, and ugly, and his malicious words and deeds, ultimately left Dianne feeling irrelevant, disgraced, and utterly inadequate.

As Bentley’s romance with Rebekah Mason heated up, so did his abuse of Dianne. Though not physical in nature, Bentley’s abusive conduct was so disparaging towards Dianne that even the couple’s four sons and some of his grandchildren have felt the need to disassociate from him.

Once Bentley became governor, he changed. He was

Bentley’s Real Executive Protection – Part 3, Forbidden Love: #ALpolitics @GovernorBentley’s Secret Love Affair

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

---

Bentley’s Real Executive Protection

Forbidden Love – Robert Bentley’s Secret Love Affair – Part 3

By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published (via Facebook) on September 11, 2015
Used with permission

George L. Beck, Jr., is the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, which includes Montgomery.

George L. Beck Jr. was sworn in as the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama on July 6, 2011. He was nominated by President Obama on March 31,2011, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on June 30, 2011.
Prior to being appointed, George Beck served as Deputy Attorney General for the State of Alabama for eight years, and Judge Advocate General for the Corps of Alabama Army National Guard for over thirty years, retiring at the rank of Colonel. He joined a private law firm in January 2004 where he remained until he was confirmed as U.S. Attorney.
Mr. Beck received his undergraduate degree from Auburn University and his law degree from the University of Alabama.

President Obama appointed Beck to the top federal prosecutor’s job in Montgomery in 2011. Beck’s Senate confirmation took a mere three months from the date of his nomination, even in the midst of a gridlocked Congress, because Beck enjoyed the support and loyalty of Alabama’s two Republican senators, as well as its Republican governor and state attorney general. For all practical purposes, Beck is a “closet” Republican.

Beck received his law degree from the University of Alabama, where he was a law school classmate and personal friend of David Byrne, Governor Robert Bentley’s chief legal advisor. Over the years, the two men formed

Sodomy: A prime example of what’s wrong with #ALpolitics

A dear friend who is a long-time retiree, aged 78 years, entire subsistence is from a meager pension (earned from a lifetime of work in a unionized organization), supplemented with a paltry Social Security check.

She’s lived through breast cancer surgery (mastectomy) & reconstruction, other major surgeries (knee replacements) and procedures, and lives in a trailer which she owns, situated upon a lot which she rents. She has resided there many, many years.

To save money, she recently

How Much Could Alabama Save By Not Paying Legislators?

UPDATE: Sunday, 14 June 2015 – Found following main body
—
Today (Thursday, 30 April 2015) the Alabama State Senate knocked off at 11:30, and reconvened 1PM. It’s also the final day of the Legislative Session for the week – they only work three days each week – Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

An hour and a half – that’s a nice, long lunch break for a wealthy man, a powerful man – not a working man. It’s pretty cushy for someone who works three days a week, only 30 days a year. Reckon how your boss would respond if you asked for a three-day work week and a 30-day work year?

How long do you get for lunch?

Most folks get 30 minutes.

The Alabama Senate gets THREE times longer than most working folks.

But then, excesses in Alabama state politics is nothing new.

Recall that – by law – the Alabama Legislature is limited to work <30 days/year (in a 105 day period) & for that privilege, citizens & taxpayers fork over $50K+/yr in pay & compensation to them – 35 in the Senate, and 105 in the House.
TOTAL=140 men (mostly) & women.

In stark contrast, New Mexico’s State Legislators are a Volunteer Legislature (they’re elected, yes, but unpaid), and during Session, by State Law receive a Daily Federal Per Diem, and Two-Way Mileage once during a session EXCLUSIVELY.

Legislative pay in Alabama has been a hot-button issue, particularly in recent years – and, it’s unnecessarily complicated. By State Constitutional Law, their “official” pay is

How Much Has HB56 Co$t Tax Payer$ & Burdened The Alabama Board Of Nursing?

Alabama State Senator Paul Bussman, DMD, is sponsoring SB234 in the 2015 Legislative Session, which would increase members of the Alabama Board of Nursing from 13, to 15.

Alabama State Senator Paul Bussman, DMD, a Republican from Cullman, is sponsoring SB234 which, among other things, would increase size of the Alabama Board of Nursing (ABN) from 13, to 15 members.

NOTE: Recent news suggests that the Substitute Bill would leave the ABN Board size unchanged at 13.

The ABN oversees 90,660 licensees, including Advanced Practice Nurses such as CRNAs (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists) and Family Nurse Practitioners (FNPs), Registered Nurses (RNs), Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs, sometimes also called Licensed Vocational Nurses, LVNs), and Nurse Aides/Assistants.

In stark comparison, the Board of Registered Nursing in the State of California manages 390,000 Registered Nurses exclusively.

California is also a “Walk-Through” state, which means that

Dumb Dog Owner Blames Dog For Her Mistakes… Hopes You’ll Believe Her

Sure, you’ve seen ’em… the dog owner places a card around the dog’s neck which tells of the dog’s alleged bad deeds.

Some are hilarious, while others…

Well, let’s just say that others are not so bright.

TRANSLATION:

My owner was TOO STUPID to

Best Place To Meet Boys?

At a school in Alabama.

Jennifer Collins McNeill was a married 39 year old 6th Grade Teacher at Thorsby K-12 School, in Chilton County, Alabama who went after her son’s friend who was 14 years old, and whom she had met at church.

Warrants filed in Chilton County Circuit Court show that Mrs. McNeill was charged with six counts of second degree rape and two counts of second degree sodomy with a juvenile male under 16 years of age, but older than 12, between April 10, 2012 and June 28 of 2013.  Court records indicate she was released from the Chilton County Jail Saturday, August 17, 2013 after posting $160,000 bond. She is due for arraignment March 10, 2015.

Jennifer Collins McNeill, 39, was a 6th-Grade teacher and cheerleader team sponsor in Thorsby, AL when she sexually abused a student at the school where she worked. The Chilton County District Attorney has charged her with with six counts of second degree rape and two counts of second degree sodomy for different incidents with the same victim, who was aged 14 at the time.

According to research performed by a former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Education, Alabama has the nation’s HIGHEST per capita rate of sexual abuse by school system employees.

Terry Abbott, who owns Drive West Communications, a Houston, Texas-based Public Relations firm, counted a total of 781 sexual abuse cases in

Alabama Governor Bentley OK’d $580K Trooper Gate pay, lied about it

Update: Saturday, 20 February 2021
NOTE: TO THE READER: As you read any story mentioning, involving or written by Donald V. Watkins, Sr., it must be borne in mind that he is now a Federal Convict, and along with his son, Donald V. Watkins, Jr., was found guilty of numerous charges. “Donald Watkins Sr. was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr. was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.” As of the date of this note, he is in Federal Custody at Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, an administrative security facility, having been relocated away from the minimum security Federal Prison Camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

DONALD V. WATKINS
Register Number: 36223-001
Age:	72
Race:	Black
Sex:	Male
Located at: Oklahoma City FTC
Release Date: 01/10/2024

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
FATHER AND SON SENTENCED TO PRISON IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT FRAUD SCHEME
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/father-and-son-sentenced-prison-multimillion-dollar-investment-fraud-scheme

Here also is the SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT dated December 2018 entitled as:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD V. WATKINS, SR. and DONALD V. WATKINS, JR. – 2:18-cr-166-KOB-TMP
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1116081/download

See also: Donald Watkins, Son Sentenced For Federal Fraud Convictions
Updated Jul 16, 2019; Posted Jul 16, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/donald-watkins-son-to-be-sentenced-for-federal-fraud-convictions.html

See also: Donald Watkins’ $1.5 Billion Question: Was It Ever Real?
Updated Feb 23, 2019; Posted Feb 23, 2019
https://www.al.com/news/2019/02/donald-watkins-15-billion-question-was-it-ever-real.html

---

Alabama Republican Governor Robert Bentley, MD, OK’d $580,000 Trooper Gate pay, then lied about it
http://j.mp/TrooperGate

Bentley Punished DPS Bosses for Questioning Lewis’ Gigantic Overtime Pay

By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published (via Facebook) on October 12, 2014
Used with permission

Retired state trooper Capt. Mark Whitaker ran the Protective Services Division and Capitol Police in the Alabama Department of Public Safety (“DPS”) until this year. This is the DPS division responsible for guarding and driving Governor Robert Bentley. Wendell Ray Lewis was a sergeant under his command.

While running his division, Whitaker learned that Lewis’ overtime pay was pre-approved by Bentley and never to be questioned. This was even true with regard to Lewis’ claimed entitlement to 24 hours of overtime for a single day. Prior to Lewis, Whitaker had never seen a trooper make a claim for or receive 24 hours of overtime pay for a single day.

On January 14, 2014, Whitaker was called into then-DPS Director Hugh McCall’s office where McCall told Whitaker that his entire division would be transferred to the newly created Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (“ALEA”). As a result of the transfer, Whitaker, a highly respected captain, would fall under the command and supervision of Lewis, who at that time was a sergeant. Unbelievably, Captain Whitaker would be reporting to Sgt. Lewis.

This order came directly from Governor Bentley.

This humiliating role reversal was the ultimate insult for Whitaker, a career officer who had climbed the ranks within DPS and earned his command position. According to published reports, Whitaker believes this demeaning and insulting personnel action – a captain reporting to a sergeant – occurred merely because he sought to question Lewis’ overtime pay in the months prior.

“This is what I get for doing my job,” Whitaker complained to McCall at the time. He retired soon after.

Whitaker is the second high-ranking trooper to retire over the Bentley-Lewis overtime pay scandal. In 2011, Major Marc McHenry, now retired, served as the DPS chief over Protective Services and the Capitol Police. Lewis also worked under McHenry.

When McHenry realized in 2011 that Lewis had accumulated a gigantic amount of overtime pay, he tried to put an end to Lewis’ financial windfall. At the time, troopers were not being paid for overtime. They were given time off instead.

McHenry sent the issue to Lewis’ supervisor, and two days later he was