Tag: corruption

Carney’s little conflict of interest

Prime Minister Mark Carney is facing conflict-of-interest allegations over his $2-billion heat pump rebate program, following revelations about past investments in manufacturers that could benefit from the subsidies.

Conservative MPs have questioned whether his former ties to Brookfield and related businesses create a conflict, much like other government initiatives launched since Carney took office. The available disclosures on the matter do not technically establish that Carney designed the program to benefit those companies, but the connection seems obvious to critics.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is facing conflict-of-interest allegations over his $2-billion heat pump rebate program after ethics filings revealed past investments in manufacturers that could benefit from the taxpayer-funded subsidies.

“How is that not corrupt?” Conservative MP John Brassard, chair of the Commons ethics committee, demanded in the House of Commons on Thursday.

“The conflict of interest is so blatantly obvious, but what’s surprising is the Prime Minister’s not even hiding it anymore,” Brassard said.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre also accused Carney of directing taxpayer money toward Brookfield-connected businesses while speaking to reporters on Parliament Hill before question period.

“The Prime Minister just finished announcing he’s going to take $2 billion out of the pockets of Canadians and give it to companies like those owned by Brookfield,” Poilievre said.

He argued Canadians should decide for themselves whether to purchase heat pumps rather than have Ottawa redistribute their money.

The rebates, however, are intended for homeowners rather than direct corporate grants, although manufacturers and installers could benefit from increased demand.

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Watch the Hosts of ‘The View’ Openly Campaign for Texas Democrat James Talarico on the Air

This week, Ana Navarro, Whoopi Goldberg, and the rest of the crew on ‘The View’ openly campaigned for far left Texas Democrat James Talarico on the air, in what seems to be a clear violation of FCC rules.

This has been happening a lot lately. Less than two weeks ago, Ana Navarro openly campaigned for a Democrat running for a House seat in Florida.

Trump’s FCC has been looking into these claims. It couldn’t be more obvious, could it?

The hosts are openly cheerleading for the Democrats to win.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

SUNNY HOSTIN: I think we will. I think we will see Texas go blue, actually.

I really do.

In September not only one but eight pollsters had Talarico ahead. 51 to 45 percent. That’s significant given a Democrat hasn’t won statewide office in 30 years. That same poll showed that he is leading Paxton among women, 56 percent to 40 percent. Among voters, 18 to 29, 66 percent to 22 percent. And among Hispanics 62 percent to 30 percent. We are talking about Texas. He is going to win this race.

GOLDBERG: We’ll see. We’ll see.

GOLDBERG: Remember. As – I’m sorry. As you guys pointed out the other day, we’ve seen this before. We have seen – I and suddenly some weird number comes out. And you’re going, ‘wait, what happened?’ So, fingers crossed.

ANA NAVARRO: You’re not kidding. 2016 left me scarred.

GOLDBERG: I know.

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“I Know The Truth”: Mother Breaks Silence On Daughter’s Mysterious Death At Russian Plague Lab

The mother of a Russian scientist who died under mysterious circumstances at a high-security plague laboratory is speaking out, accusing medical authorities of allowing her daughter to die as questions mount over what happened inside the facility.

Darya Shipilova, 28, died October 2 after developing a rapidly progressing illness while working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia, a facility that handles some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens.

This week, Shipilova’s mother raised explosive questions about the Russian government’s official account.

“They simply let my daughter die,” Svetlana Shipilova alleged, according to the Independent.

The grieving mother also challenged reports suggesting her daughter accidentally broke a test tube containing hazardous biological material, arguing that the laboratory’s protective containers were virtually impossible to shatter.

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Trump Treasury Blocks $175 Million In Federal Payments To Dead Recipients

The Treasury Department blocked $175 million in federal payments from going to deceased recipients in fiscal year 2026 as the Trump administration expanded efforts to prevent fraud and improper government spending.

Treasury screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling approximately $3.7 trillion during the fiscal year, identifying and returning about 13,500 payments that otherwise would have gone to people listed as deceased, according to the department.

The results represent another step in President Donald Trump’s push to tighten safeguards around taxpayer money. Access to Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system expanded from roughly 4 percent of federal programs at the end of fiscal 2025 to 99 percent in fiscal 2026.

“Treasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

The administration’s efforts received praise from Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who spent years pushing legislation giving Treasury permanent access to Social Security death records.

“Unless you were playing Frisbee in the quad during Econ 101, you know the federal government shouldn’t be sending taxpayer money to dead people,” Kennedy said.

Congress advanced legislation to permanently authorize the Social Security Administration to share its full Death Master File with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system, giving federal agencies more complete death information when determining eligibility for payments.

Treasury has also added safeguards to verify bank account ownership and Taxpayer Identification Numbers associated with federal payments. Those capabilities became fully operational Sept. 30, allowing Treasury to flag payments that fail verification before the money leaves government coffers.

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Report: Federal Govt Spent $26.5 Billion on NGOs for Illegal Migrants

A new report finds that the U.S. government doled out 1,272 awards to pay for programs costing $26.5 billion to encourage and welcome illegal migration.

The site DataRepublican.com has gotten down into the financial weeds with a review of spending on migrant resettlement and Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) awards through January of 2025.

The site also noted there are 217 contracts worth $5.2 billion that are still active.

The active contracts include $3.4 billion to care for unaccompanied children who are already in the system. An additional $544 million is going to aid states with migrants who are already here and in the system, and $1.2 billion is being spent on other ORR grants that have already been granted.

One other program costing five million dollars has been forced to remain active by a court order.

The Trump administration has also canceled 63 awards, worth a total of $186 million.

In September, the White House outlined nearly $1 billion in wasted tax dollars spent on migrants.

The White House recently launched a new initiative to eliminate wasteful and harmful spending and pledged to “cut wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens.”

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Husband of Texas Mayor Arrested by ICE

The husband of a Texas mayor was arrested by ICE for overstaying his visa.

Armando Garza Lira, the husband of Crystal City, Texas, Mayor Jose Cerda, was arrested on Wednesday night for overstaying his visa.

According to NewsNation, the Zavala County Sheriff’s Department along with ICE took Lira into custody following complaints he was in the US illegally.

NewsNation reported:

The husband of Crystal City, Texas, Mayor Jose Cerda was arrested by ICE Wednesday night, law enforcement sources told NewsNation.

According to NewsNation sources, Armando Garza Lira overstayed his visa. NewsNation has reached out to the city and has not received a response.

In a statement, the Zavala County Sheriff’s Office said it took Lira into custody after conducting immigration enforcement action following complaints of an individual reportedly residing unlawfully in Crystal City, 115 miles southwest of San Antonio.

Lira was transported to the Zavala County Jail, where he was transferred to jail personnel pending further immigration enforcement action by federal authorities.

Cerda was released without further incident.

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The Left Doesn’t Count Votes. It Finds Them.

f you saw a recent NYT report on Brazil’s election between incumbent socialist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Flávio Bolsonaro, you may have noticed that the Left’s “paper of record” made an astounding, if unintended, admission in the headline: it reveals its conception of elections. In its words, “Flávio Bolsonaro’s first round lead leaves President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks to find the votes to stop Brazil’s rightward shift” (italics mine). It doesn’t say “prevail in the election by voter turnout,” but it casts the election as an implied political obligation to manufacture ballots to block voter will and engineer an imposed social order against it. This is clearly the Left’s intention in November.

While this may read as routine journalism, or perhaps just wishful thinking on the writers’ part, it may strike some readers as more of a Freudian slip about how the Left’s mental worldview works: leftist parties operate under a duty to manufacture enough ballots to overcome an election deficit. If your candidate falls behind, you intervene on the sidelines to close the gap. This is now their “normalized” concept of an election.

More than that, progressives have inverted the structure of an election from one that sets two opponents in passive receipt of votes to an actively managed, planned event that aids one side during the election. What was traditionally an arm’s-length contest becomes a pre-existing agreement.

Rather than preserving a quiet period after the close of campaigning to measure the public result of candidate marketing through voluntary voter turnout, the election becomes merely part of their total political campaign operation. It turns votes into indicators, and the indicators into corrective ballot measures.

This obviously goes by other names, such as rigging, stealing, cheating, and fraud, but the extraordinary aspect of this language in the NYT is how it reveals a shift in political psychology and a determination to make that abnormal psychology generally accepted behavior. It resembles the Left’s efforts to make people think that transgender athletes are legitimate contestants among biological females: it asks you to accept a fraud as a right, and, more than that, that you are wrong for questioning it. That is how election fraud works: objections violate a higher moral standing claimed by the victor, even though the victor obtained it through deception.

To use an analogy, it is like two horses in a race where the spectators rush the racetrack on the losing horse, inject him with amphetamines, block the other rider, and the racing judge looks the other way, while the crowd is asked to keep quiet out of fairness to the horse.

To use a good legal analogy, it would be like two legal opponents in a trial, along with their lawyers, actually accompanying the jury into the deliberation room and trying to measure which way they’re leaning and “tip” the scales. Jurors privately deliberate after closing arguments because they weigh what they heard and reach a protected verdict based only on the evidence presented in open court.

Elections are the same: voters effectively go into private deliberation after hearing both sides, cast their ballots in private, and the verdict is then announced in the open “public court.” We have certain appeal processes for election irregularity (e.g., Florida in 2000 and Bush v. Gore), or for an election “mistrial,” as in a deadlock (a runoff or recount), including the discretion to count state electors (e.g., Pence, 2021). In all cases, the counting or verdict is subject to a quiet period, and campaigning of any kind must stand down.

The other key factor in Brazil that is reframing the Left’s vision of elections is based on its paranoia that any conservative candidate is a Trump candidate and ally and part of a larger plan to aid and abet President Trump’s mandates (“Brazil Is a Sign of Things to Come,” NYT, 10.5.26). But South America (and Cuba as well) has been dragging behind the West economically for decades because of its leftist political corruption and because it swings in the extreme between Left populists and Right militarists. Rarely has an actual business conservative, or even a moderate leader, emerged.

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This Florida Democrat Denies Insider Trading, but Her Financial Records Raise Serious Questions.

Over the weekend, Republican Mike Beltran accused Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor of supporting a ban on congressional insider trading only after enriching herself during her time in office. Castor dismissed the allegations as “false,” but the exchange puts her financial record, and the timing of her support for restrictions, under renewed scrutiny.

Unfortunately for Castor, denial does not make her financial records disappear. Her disclosure after entering Congress in 2007 put her net worth at a minimum of $803,039; the estimate based on her 2024 disclosure places it between $7.2 million and $22.5 million, including jointly held assets and her husband’s investments. Public service, apparently, has not been bad for the household finances.

Then there is the timing of her stock sales. On March 10, one day before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, Castor sold between $32,004 and $130,000 in stocks. That included between $15,001 and $50,000 in Berkshire Hathaway shares, which closed that day at $202.73 before falling to $175.97 just two days later. Franklin Templeton shares she sold also fell over the same period, from $20.15 to $16.76. 

Castor’s household investment portfolio also reaches into China. Between March and December 2024, Castor’s husband bought and sold between $7,007 and $105,000 in the T. Rowe Price International Discovery Fund, which invests in companies outside the United States and counts China as its fourth-largest country allocation. The exposure is indirect, through a mutual fund, but that still leaves a fair question: How much attention does a member of Congress pay to where the family’s money is invested? 

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The Lancet Jumps the Shark

The Lancet’s latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence.

Titled “Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective,” it promises to examine the mRNA platform from mechanistic, preclinical, clinical, and public health perspectives.

Instead, it delivers a remarkably confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate over the past five years.

What makes the review effective as messaging is not that it ignores controversy, but that it appears to engage with it.

It names difficult issues — residual DNA, biodistribution, frameshifting, and IgG4 class switching — only to swiftly minimise them with reassuring language.

The effect is to create the appearance of critical scrutiny while reassuring readers that these concerns are either resolved or insignificant.

The review describes mRNA vaccines as a “transformative advance” characterised by “rapid clearance,” “lack of genomic integration,” and a “favourable safety profile.” It concludes that the accumulated evidence “affirms” the platform as safe, effective, and adaptable.

Ironically, the review sits behind a paywall. Most journalists will never read it, many doctors will see only the abstract, and policymakers are likely to rely on its conclusions without examining the evidence in detail.

Having spent more than five years examining regulatory decisions, FOI documents, advisory committee meetings, and independent laboratory findings on mRNA vaccines, I expected the review to grapple with the questions that repeatedly emerged during those investigations. But it didn’t.

The authors note that after injection, mRNA lipid nanoparticles “remain largely localised to the injection site” with “limited distribution” to secondary organs. The review also notes that vaccine mRNA has been detected in human plasma for up to 14 days in some recipients, and that mRNA and spike antigen have been found in draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days.

But these findings are quickly reframed as evidence of “rapid clearance” and “short-lived antigen expression” — a conclusion presented with far greater confidence than the underlying evidence appears to warrant.

Only last year, members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee questioned the manufacturers after discovering that biodistribution studies had never been conducted using the commercial vaccine administered to millions of people.

When asked directly whether those studies had been performed, company representatives struggled to answer, exposing important gaps in the evidence base. Yet those gaps receive little attention in the review.

Residual DNA is treated similarly.

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Senator Says Hegseth Barred Him From Gulf Base to ‘Cover Up the True Cost’ of Iran War

A US senator visiting the Persian Gulf said Tuesday that the Pentagon blocked him from inspecting a heavily damaged American military installation and refused to arrange a briefing on the Iran War, accusing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of mounting an “unprecedented” effort to conceal the conflict’s costs and consequences from lawmakers and the public.

“This trip confirmed for me that there is an active, unprecedented, unconstitutional effort underway to hide the costs of this war and the implications of this war from Congress and the American people,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told reporters Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Murphy said he sought to inspect Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military installation in the Middle East and a crucial hub for American operations in the region. The base was struck by Iranian missiles during the opening days of the war and sustained heavy damage, including a direct hit to its Combined Air Operations Center.

“I’ve never encountered anything like this in my time in the Senate,” the senator said, describing the Pentagon’s actions as “part of a deliberate campaign of obfuscation that my Republican colleagues in Congress should demand an end to.”

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