Senator Wyden could have asked Long to name five things he did last week. Guessing that would have been a stumper.
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Man, Don John just loves him a cheat or a fraud. And he wants them all out running about the planet committing as many scams and crimes as they can fit into their scummy lifetimes. … He seems to be especially fond of those who cheat the nation, the state, the government and the citizenry. I suppose they’re closest to his heart because he is one. …
Republicans apparently agree that most of the actual spending in government health programs is waste, fraud and abuse, but anything a rich dude steals from it is money WELL spent.
If it’s good for a billionaire, it’s great for the country. (That may even go for a limited number of millionaires – the ones nearest the top of the pile.) But if the spending line is good for non-richie-rich folk, then it’s worth diddly squat. And if it deprives a billionaire of one extra penny then it must becexpunged from the books and never brought up again.
From the truthout piece: " President Donald Trump has quietly commuted the sentence of a Florida health care executive convicted of leading a Medicare fraud scheme to pilfer $205 million… Last Wednesday, Trump granted clemency to two dozen people, including Lawrence Duran, who was convicted in 2011 for defrauding Medicare and money laundering, among other charges. Duran, who owned a mental health care company with seven locations across Florida, and his girlfriend received $87 million from the scheme.
“This was, at the time, the largest therapy-related Medicare fraud scheme in history, with hundreds of thousands of false claims. Duran was sentenced to 50 years in prison, and he and other collaborators were ordered to pay $87 million in restitution.”
Don’t you dare try to punish people who do beautiful things like this! “Don’t you know that they’re my heroes? They’re the wind beneath Donny’s wings!”
How so much of the public can completely miss this and how most Republican elected officials just seem simply not to care in the least continues to be beyond my understanding.
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Yes!
Wyden has been very good. I attended a town hall where he came out and told us how his mother -still a teen- had persisted in warning her family that “something is not right” with the government. They finally listened to her but with very little time to make their escape. Wyden ended the story by repeating his mother’s warning, “something is not right.”
But yes, All of them, even the most active, have to be out demonstrating -every day- that they are fighting for us.
The media is an outrage. Places like MSNBC and Meidas hype even the smallest of incidents as fortune changing, while the rest muddle, muck, and meander until neither side seems to differ.
Did this guy have to respond to Elon’s “five things you did last week” email? If so, let’s see his reply.
Billy Long did in fact respond. As requested, here is his response:
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I got so effing drunk from cheap bourbon that I fell down the stairs and face planted.
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I had to stay home in bed the next day because half my face was bruised and puffy and my left eye was swollen shut, and OMFG, the hangover.
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So, I went to the casino with my buds and some babes we’re friends with if you know what I mean, and we lost a couple Gs but still we did pretty well, hehe.
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I was gonna go into the office but we drank a little much at the casino the night before and stayed up too late if you know what I mean, hehe, so I stayed home.
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Finally, then, I fired like 2,000 agents investigating tax fraud --all by email blast before noon without me having to go into the office–so I took off the rest of the day off and had a cocktail or two with some pals. Okay, maybe we played cards a little late and we emptied a few bottles, and OMFG, the hangover.
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In a statement to TPM, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who is the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, suggested the calendar data from OPM indicates Long and some of his associates were taking advantage of the agency, which plays a crucial part in the federal bureaucracy.
“If you ask me, it sure looks like Congressman Long got himself and some pals no-show jobs with maxed-out federal salaries,” Wyden said, adding, “Somebody who abuses taxpayer dollars like that shouldn’t come within 100 miles of the IRS.”
Jesus F. Christ.
The mentality that’s drove Wyden to reflexively frame this as “ha-ha evidently, they’re lazy freeloaders heh gotcha” is killing us.
You can hear the slowly shrinking circle of those desperately determined to continue playing politics by 1992 rules going “Good show! That’s how it’s done! Points were scored! And they’re step by step falling into your cunning trap with their response.”
It’s the old “everything looks like a nail when your only tool is a hammer” problem, with the “hammer” in question being the tiny gentle rubber mallet of politics in a still mostly functional democracy where the stakes of the game of politics seemed smaller than they’d been at any point since 1929.
Because no, Ron. The message here is: “We all see what’s going on here. These guys are destroying the government and democracy so the weirdo billionaires backing Trump can do whatever they want to the rest of us. They’re breaking laws left and right to do it. So of course they’re breaking the the public records law to try to hide it.”
We have been past the point when continuing to play politics by 1992 rules is an option since 2015. We must not play by authoritarian rules, but we are in a the middle of a fucking coup and we have to step up and play by fucking crisis rules. because–and I cannot emphasize this enough–it is not 1992 anymore, Dorthey.
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Billy Long, promoted from one of the shithole states by the Trump government, sounds like a number of the appointees in the first Trump term who were so obviously misspending our money on themselves. But if he makes only the maximum salary of–what was it, $195,000?–he’ll have to do a lot more grifting to keep up. Maybe sell get-out-of-jail-free cards to the wealthy whom the IRS would otherwise need to investigate?
It occurs to me that a promise of gainful featherbedding in the Trump administration might be all that is needed to keep a number of Republican Congress critters from criticizing or restraining his administration in any way. Very simple, really.
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Did DOGE ever ask Long what he accomplished in the previous week?
It seems that Long was chosen for his lack of expertise. He’d be willing to do witch hunts against Trump’s enemies, which is all MAGA needs from him.
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Apparently Long and his associates are “too important” and too highly paid to follow work tracking norms…
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