Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Received a $1400 Covid Stimulus Check
February 7, 2022
On April 15, 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev murdered three people and injured more than 250 others in the horrific Boston Marathon bombing. Seven years later, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev collected a Covid stimulus check in federal prison.
For his role in orchestrating the bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to several life sentences in federal prison, as well as the death penalty (though the death penalty sentence was vacated and is currently under review by the US Supreme Court).
So why is Tsarnaev receiving stimulus checks from the U.S. government?
In March of 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, which included provisions to send $1,400 stimulus checks to all citizens making less than $75,000 filing individually or $150,000 filing jointly. This included felons. Some Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) raised the issue and forced a vote to amend the CARES Act to exclude felons from receiving stimulus money, but it ultimately failed, and felons were included. This means that in addition to Tsarnaev, the likes of Dylan Roof, who murdered nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, also received stimulus checks.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that a judge ordered Tsarnaev’s stimulus check be seized and put towards the $10.1 million in criminal restitution he owes his victims. So far, he has paid just over $2,000 of that $10 million, despite having an additional personal trust account with a balance of over $3,000.
While there is plenty of healthy debate to be had regarding the efficacy of the stimulus checks, one thing most people should be able to agree on is that murderers like Tsarnaev should not receive federal aid financed by your tax dollars and ever-increasing government debt.
City of Fort Collins Taxpayers Left With $45 Million Bill for Failed Internet Project
February 8, 2022
In November of 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill, which spends $42 billion to create government owned networks – government ownership of the new internet. Government is now competing against Comcast, AT&T, and others to own the access points to the internet. Critics say it’s simply Soviet.
On the local level, municipalities are failing spectacularly in their quest to own the internet and costing taxpayers big bucks along the way. For example, Sarah Hunt, a resident of Fort Collins, Colorado, investigated the mismanagement of their local taxpayer funded government broadband experiment. In total, Fort Collins residents were left footing a $45 million bill.
Hunt describes how local leaders pushed for a broadband project called Connexion, while completely missing the mark on cost estimates and revenue figures. Coleman Keene and Darin Atteberry both earned six figure salaries while planning the project. Atteberry left his position just before the failings of the Connexion project were made public.
Hunt concluded, “Connexion missed targeted revenues by nearly $10 million, and is over budget on build-out and installation by a massive $35 million.”
Fort Collins missed their target by such a large margin due to poor estimates and assumptions. The city overestimated the existing amount of conduit, underestimated the cost of installation, overestimated the amount of apartment and multi family unit consumers, and overestimated the number of business and commercial subscribers.
Every good business knows to err on the side of overestimating costs and underestimating revenues. Of course, municipal governments don’t care. It isn't their money, it’s yours!
U.S. Continues to Send Taxpayer Dollars to the Taliban in Afghanistan
February 9, 2022
After a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer, one would think the U.S. would stop sending funds to the newly-installed Taliban government. But according to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), taxpayer dollars are still flowing to the Taliban in the form of humanitarian aid.
A letter from Ernst and 14 of her Senate colleagues to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated, “We write to express significant concerns over the recent announcement from the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC) on the issuance of General Licenses (GLs) authorizing the flow of U.S. taxpayer dollars through the Taliban and the Haqqani network.”
“While we agree widespread famine and denial of rights to Afghan women and girls are immediate problems to address with humanitarian aid and assistance, OFAC’s sweeping authorization risks too much U.S. taxpayer money flowing through the Taliban or the Haqqani network to fund an excessive, ill-fated, or wasteful list of services such as activities to support the rule of law by the Taliban, education exchanges in a country that now devalues education for women and girls, and endangered species research.”
It is unclear exactly how much money is flowing into Afghanistan. According to Sen. Ernst, the majority of the money is for humanitarian aid, however, money has also been sent for other purposes, like “endangered species research.”
The Biden Administration is continuing to issue General Licenses that give “broad authorizations” to non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and the U.S. government to export various materials and funding to the Taliban controlled Afghani government.
While reasonable people can debate the amount of humanitarian aid the U.S. should send abroad, giving broad authorizations to send free stuff to a terrorist state seems like a bad idea.
Throwback Thursday – In 1979, Dept. of Labor Never Completed a $529,000 “Census of Samoans” in Orange County
February 10, 2022
Throwback Thursday!
In 1979, the U.S. Department of Labor spent $140,000 on a never-completed census of the Samoan population of Orange County, California — almost $529,000 in 2021 dollars.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a local Orange County official said he didn’t care that it wasn’t completed, as the point of the study was to put unemployed Santa Ana residents to work.
For the wasteful and nonsensical spending, Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave the Department of Labor a Golden Fleece award.
“Not only has no final report been submitted — four months after it was due — but even the limited raw data supposedly collected cannot be found,” Proxmire said then. “The former head of the program is reported to now be in Samoa, outside U.S. jurisdiction, and authorities' attempts to contact him have so far failed.”
According to the Orange County Register, one local official said that he was not upset by the lack of any finished product to show for the money.
“The purpose of the contract was to provide employment and training to unemployed Santa Ana residents and a by-product of this was to be a study,” the official was quoted as saying. “Just because the study wasn't completed, I don't think it can be said the city got the raw end of things.”
Proxmire disagreed.
“This mindless method of spending is exactly why there is so much waste and so little accountability of government spending,” he said.
Dr. Fauci’s NIAID Spent $478,188 to Turn Monkeys Transgender
February 11, 2022
The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases’ role in funding gain of function research in China, as well as a recent bombshell report on cruel experiments on beagles, has focused a white-hot spotlight on their research grants.
Here's another highly questionable expenditure: According to an NIH grantoriginally uncovered by The National Pulse, Fauci’s agency awarded grants totaling $478,188 in Fiscal Years 2021 and 2022 to inject hormones into male monkeys to make them female.
The grant from the NIH was awarded to Scripps Research in Jupiter, Florida. In the abstract, the researchers state that “TGW [transgender women] have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults. A key part of gender affirmation in TGW is feminizing hormone therapy (FHT), of which the main drug is the hormone estradiol.”
To address this, the researchers “will model FHT [female hormone therapy] in nonhuman primates to prospectively address two knowledge gaps about the impact of FHT on the male immune system… Ultimately, the experiments proposed here will begin to uncover how FHT can affect HIV susceptibility and the outcome of immune interventions in TGW.”
All grantees that receive funding from the NIH are required to follow the ethical guidelines put forth in the Guide for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. It states that “Studies that may result in…significant alterations in the animals’ ability to maintain normal physiology…should include descriptions of appropriate humane endpoints or provide science-based justification for not using a particular, commonly accepted humane endpoint.”
It is unclear if an official ethical justification for this experiment was ever provided. The chief bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health is Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady. Grady earned $238,970 in 2021 which is more than the vice president of the U.S. makes each year.
Should the NIH be funding animal research, especially research that alters the gender of the animal?
The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.