Patterico's Pontifications

4/26/2013

Interview with Tsarnaev Carjacking Victim

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 9:32 pm



On a normal day, this would count as the most interesting thing I had read all day. But the NYT Pigford story came out today, so we’ll call this the second most interesting thing I read all day:

After a zigzagging trek through Brighton, Watertown, and back to Cambridge, Danny would seize his chance for escape at the Shell Station on Memorial Drive, his break turning on two words — “cash only” — that had rarely seemed so welcome.

When the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was forced to go inside the Shell Food Mart to pay, older brother Tamerlan put his gun in the door pocket to fiddle with a navigation device — letting his guard down briefly after a night on the run. Danny then did what he had been rehearsing in his head. In a flash, he unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door, stepped through, slammed it behind, and sprinted off at an angle that would be a hard shot for any marksman.

“F—!” he heard Tamerlan say, feeling the rush of a near-miss grab at his back, but the man did not follow. Danny reached the haven of a Mobil station across the street, seeking cover in the supply room, shouting for the clerk to call 911.

His quick-thinking escape, authorities say, allowed police to swiftly track down the Mercedes, abating a possible attack by the brothers on New York City and precipitating a wild shootout in Watertown that would seriously wound one officer, kill Tamerlan, and leave a severely injured Dzhokhar hiding in the neighborhood.

Read it all.

Awwwww: Sorority Scold Resigns

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:27 pm



I guess somebody decided that the “HORRIBLE, I repeat, HORRIBLE PR FOR THIS CHAPTER” was coming from her, rather than “people being fucking WEIRD at sports” and “people LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD and so fucking BORING.” What has the world of sororities come to?

A University of Maryland student, who sent a profanity-filled email to her sorority sisters that went viral, has resigned from her role in the Delta Gamma sorority, the organization announced on its website.

“Delta Gamma has accepted the resignation of one of its members whose email relating to a social event has been widely distributed and publicized through social media and traditional media channels,” the statement read.

I don’t know if she quit the whole sorority or just her role as whatever the heck she was when she was yelling at everybody.

Too bad. She was kinda funny.

I’m linking my Paul Anka/Sorority Scold hybrid again, because not enough people commented on it before, which makes me want to scream profanities at all of you in all caps. The girls get skirts!

Breitbart Was Right: New York Times Does Front-Page Story on Rampant Pigford Fraud

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:37 am



Alternate headline: New York Times reveals its racism.

Andrew Breitbart would tell anyone who would listen, at great length, about the Pigford fraud. Pigford was a class action lawsuit brought by black people who claimed to be farmers, and said the Agriculture Department had discriminated against them in making loan decisions. A court case had identified 91 potential claimants — but the Obama administration decided to engage in a more massive payout: $50,000 to virtually anybody who claimed that they had “attempted to farm” but could not because of discrimination.

Dangling $50,000 checks in front of people, while requiring almost no documentation (an affidavit from a pal backing you up was plenty good enough), predictably led to rampant fraudulent claims:

“It was the craziest thing I have ever seen,” one former high-ranking department official said. “We had applications for kids who were 4 or 5 years old. We had cases where every single member of the family applied.” The official added, “You couldn’t have designed it worse if you had tried.”

. . . .

In 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina, the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.

In Maple Hill, a struggling town in southeastern North Carolina, the number of people paid was nearly four times the total number of farms. More than one in nine African-American adults there received checks. In Little Rock, Ark., a confidential list of payments shows, 10 members of one extended family collected a total of $500,000, and dozens of other successful claimants shared addresses, phone numbers or close family connections.

The scope of the problem runs into billions of dollars:

[A]n examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion.

Especially infuriating: when prosecutors were given a test case of fraud, in which the claimant admitted lying in his application, they declined to prosecute — and the reason both amuses and infuriates:

In Arkansas, prosecutors rejected a test case against a Pine Bluff police officer who had admitted lying on his claim form. Paula J. Casey, the United States attorney in Arkansas in 2000, said that singling out one individual raised questions of selective prosecution.

“The defendant could go to the jury and say: ‘Everybody else did this. Why am I standing here?’ ” she said.

There’s so much fraud, you see, that you can’t prosecute just one person. So you can’t prosecute anybody.

This is, of course, absurd logic. If it’s hard to prosecute people for reasons of proof, and you have someone who confessed, it’s not “selective prosecution” to charge that person. This reasoning, followed to its logical conclusion, would make it impossible to prosecute Internet fraud, which is certainly rampant and difficult to prosecute.

But, you see, there is a difference. The government does not aid and abet Internet fraud as a general rule. Prosecuting an Internet fraud case would not be embarrassing for the Obama administration.

Not so for a Pigford fraud case.

The article is stunning — and an incredible vindication of Andrew Breitbart:

Andrew’s site actually gets a nod in today’s article:

Public criticism came primarily from conservative news outlets like Breitbart.com and from Congressional conservatives like Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, who described the program as rife with fraud. Few Republicans or Democrats supported him. Asked why, Mr. King said, “Never underestimate the fear of being called a racist.”

The Pigford fraud is not news to you folks. It was featured prominently here in several posts, many by Lee Stranahan, who worked closely with Andrew on the story. You can read the posts by searching the site for Pigford (just hit this link), but in all the coverage, one video stands out in my memory. It was published in this post. When I went to grab the embed code, it had a pitiful 891 views.

The video has to be seen to be believed. It shows someone coaching an audience on how to fill out the paperwork to get their $50,000 check. Watch the video to make your own judgment about the general attitude towards the truth in that room — both on his part, and on the part of the laughing audience. He tells people that there are four questions on the form, and that they must all be answered yes to get a check. He analogizes it to the four bases you must touch to score a run in baseball — and if all the bases aren’t touched, you go back to the dugout, meaning you don’t get a $50,000 check. He carefully explains that if they SAY they tried to farm, they DID attempt to farm, as far as the government is concerned. To call this a “wink and a nod” is being kind.

Excellent article by the New York Times. Congratulations to them, to Andrew Breitbart, and to Lee Stranahan for getting out the truth on this story.


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